


Datura

by EllaBesmirched (El_Bell)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Blood, Blood Drinking, Bloodplay, Explicit Sexual Content, Human Erwin, I guess? I mean like... vampire typical blood stuff would probably be the most accurate description, LATER, M/M, Prostitution, Vampire AU, Vampire Levi (Shingeki no Kyojin), Vampire whorehouse yo, Vampires, honestly just all the vampire tropes I can get away with
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-31
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-03-11 18:38:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 49,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13530219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/El_Bell/pseuds/EllaBesmirched
Summary: "But curiosity is a restless and scrupulous passion, and no one girl can endure, with patience, that hers should be baffled by another.” ~Carmillaby  J. Sheridan Le FanuErwin has been searching for answers for a very long time.Levi has been searching for much longer.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> OMG NEW FANDOM HI. 
> 
> This is terrifying. :D
> 
> Ok, so basically, thanks to the lovely and talented [ Ajax](https://francisthegreat.tumblr.com), I have been lurking on the edges of the beautiful pit of heartbreak and sorrow that is Eruri for months now and listen. Listen. There are some fucking AMAZING artists in this fandom and I've seen a couple Vampire Levi portraits floating around and it was just too much for my emo vampire loving heart. Ajax flat out refused to write me a vampire story ("No, El, vampires are _your_ thing") so here I am with vampire whore Levi and an Erwin who has no idea how to leave well enough alone. 
> 
> I have been able to think of nothing else since I started writing this story so I'm very, very excited (and also terrified but mostly excited) to share it with you and I hope you enjoy it :D

It’s right there.

Years of research. Countless hours spent tracking infinitesimal leads. More coin flung into the filthiest hands than he can even begin to count. All pointing to this spot.

Erwin’s heart feels like it’s going to break through his ribs and fall out of his chest with the way it’s pounding. He has come _so far._ If this isn’t what he thinks it is, he has _nothing_ left, nothing but useless coin and empty time.

This _has_ to be it.

It has to.

There is nothing unique about the shape of the manor. It could even resemble Erwin’s own, if it were a little larger, a little more well tended, a little less off the beaten path. All the shutters are drawn, though the night air is stiff with heat. Ivy grows in bedraggled lines over everything-- the ground, the walls, the eaves. It sticks the shutters closed and pushes up against the stepping stones carving a path through the barely tended lawn and the neglected garden. Erwin sees brown rose bushes with decaying white blossoms, wilting hydrangea, crumbling peony, azalea, and hibiscus. Here and there a particularly tenacious bloom has grown, but they are all being slowly strangled by the ivy and by a thick blanket of moonflowers so white they seem to glow in the night. Their perfume is overpowering, choking the air so Erwin almost can't smell the sickly sweet decay of the dead and dying flowers.

Erwin feels as if he has stepped into a forgotten cemetery, where only the most vicious, strangling beauty has been left to flourish, to sink sticky, destructive roots into every scrap of life until nothing else is left. If he looks very hard, he can even see the time-smoothed faces of cherubic statues poking up through the ivy and moonflower like headstones or teeth.

He stands on the empty, dusty street for a long time, sweat sticking his hair to his forehead, and his silks to his back. The manor looks abandoned. He can’t hear any sounds but the whisper of summer dry leaves and the sporadic call of a night bird. He’d left his horse tethered just off the path an hour ago and had hiked the rest of the way, in the dry dark.

What will he do if he finds nothing?

What will he do if he finds everything?

He is too far gone now to care. He has to see this through.

Finally, he lays his boot against the first stone on the path. And then the next, and the next, until he is standing in front of a once elegant, but mostly unassuming wooden door with aged and unkempt carvings of thorny roses sprawling out from the center. There is an old knocker there, two roses connected by a twisting loop of thorns.

Erwin knocks.

At first, there is no sound, nor movement. The silence Erwin had broken reconstitutes itself around him, and there is only the night once more, and the furious pounding of his heart.

The door opens, and Erwin’s blood rushes in his ears, frantic and violent and so loud he almost doesn’t hear the way the door creaks.

Someone stands on the other side. They are sharp and thin, with a pale pointed chin and pale pointed nose, and terribly, terribly beautiful, with white skin so smooth and eyes so flat they appear cold and ageless as a statue. Nothing in their face or their clothing tells Erwin if he is looking at a man or a woman; they wear tight trousers, riding boots, a vest and white shirt with ruffles at the chest, and square spectacles. The rushing in his head washes over him and every single cell in his body begs him to run, run far, run fast, and never look back.

They lift a brow.

Erwin fumbles, digs a carved stone coin from his pocket and holds it out like a frightened child. He’d killed a man for that coin. Erwin could still feel the heat of his blood on Erwin’s boots when he’d done it. If he was wrong--

They finger the coin, turn it over once, their lips lifting at the corner. “And where did you get this?”

Their voice is like the night: smooth and velvet and dangerous. Erwin has the sudden urge to throw himself at their feet, or else run them through with the blade at his side. Their words are accented, but it is so slight, Erwin can’t place it. The moonlight flashes from their spectacles and Erwin sees that their eyes are deep and wonderfully dark and, perhaps, just a little manic.

“I earned it,” he tells them, voice hoarse and choked in his throat.

They bring the coin to their nose and inhale, deliberate, only for his benefit. He thinks of the way the man’s blood had spattered, how the coin had landed in a splash of red and Erwin had scrubbed it until his fingers were raw.

“I see you did.”

They hand it back. Erwin feels dizzy.

“What is your name?”

“Erwin. Smith,” he adds. They blink and Erwin watches a strange cloud pass in front of their dark eyes.

“We’ve been expecting you, my lord.”

The blood singing in his ears begins to whine and everything, _everything_ he is pulses horribly and begs him to leave. His fingers and toes itch for movement, to tear off into the black night where it’s _safe._

“Please, come in.”

They step aside, and Erwin follows them.

He expects dust and decay. He expects it to smell like a crypt, to smell of dead flowers and dirt and rot. Instead, he smells oily candlewax, the bright, clean tang of vinegar, and something nameless and intoxicating. It is dim, but he can see. The wooden floors are swept; the intricately woven rug appears ancient, but well kept.

They lead Erwin into a small room to the left of the door, and he sees coats hung on hooks, shoes pressed into cubbies, and boxes with indistinguishable contents.

“Your coat, my lord.” Erwin hands it to them. “And your sword.”

Here he hesitates. He has other weapons, hidden in his sleeves, and his pockets, and his pant leg. But to give up his sword...

They smile and the expression is so kind Erwin knows it is a falsehood. “I’m sure you will find our supplies more than acceptable.”

_Supplies?_

Erwin unbuckles his sword and hands it to them.

“And your shoes. And the contents of your pockets. You may keep your purse, but I would like to see it.”

“May I keep my watch?” Erwin asks, laying his hand on the pocket in his vest where he keeps it.

They purse their lips. He pulls it out and flips it open so that they can see it is only a watch, and unhooks the other end of the chain so they can see that too.

“Very well.”

Erwin does not look at them as he slides it back into place. He doesn’t hesitate to show them his purse, to drop the knife he had in his pocket into the small box they’re holding, and the sachet of dried flowers. They wrinkle their nose and pull back when it leaves his hands and they say, “Well, aren’t you a cautious one?”

Under any other circumstances, Erwin might have smiled. The garlic blooms had been a whim, really. He’d never truly expected to get past the door with them.

When he is done giving them the things they have asked for, they step forward. They barely rise up to his chin, but he still almost flinches at their sudden closeness.

“Hold out your arms, Mister Smith.”

Erwin is slow to move. There is a certain sinuous quality to their voice that causes their words to slide together, to slip seductive into his ears and make him want to obey even before he truly knows what they have said. He lifts his arms, and they reach up to pass their hands, light and delicate, over his body.

They pause at his right wrist, and raise their brows again.

Erwin says nothing as he silently rolls back his sleeve and removes the wooden blade he had hidden there, in a sheath specially made just for this.

They tsk gently. “Ours is a relationship based on trust, Mister Smith. Why so wary?”

Erwin only blinks at them and then they startle him by laughing _loudly._ “Come, my lord. Let me show you what it is you are so afraid of.”

The house is still silent. They lead Erwin out of the room, and down a long, bare hallway. When they open a door and start to descend down a dangerously dark stairwell, Erwin begins to feel as he is being buried alive. He is walking, willingly, into the mouth of a monster, and all he has is a scrap of wood, hidden in his pant leg, and a pocket watch.

There is a door at the bottom of the stair, thick and heavy and carved with roses like the front door-- but these are less worn. They open the door, and _finally_ the awful silence is broken.

Erwin steps through the door and is shocked at what he sees.

The lighting is bright enough that nothing is inscrutable, but still dim and casting shadows. He can smell incense and perfume and more moonflowers mingling with the nameless intoxicant of this person’s skin, and the horribly mundane swirl of human sweat. Someone is playing a piano; someone else is singing, the words soft, sibilant, sensual.

The room is huge, perhaps covering the entire breadth of the manor, and, judging by the comfortably cool air and all the stairs he just descended, deep underground. It is filled with people like Erwin-- pampered lordlings drenched in silks, stiff old men with gold rings glinting at their fingertips, even a handful of woman with pressed curls and dripping with jewelry.

And then there are the others. Like the person at Erwin’s side, they are ageless and beautiful and utterly terrifying. Most of them talk with one another, cluster in small groups and ignore the way their fellows are curling around the guests.

Erwin understands then, what he is seeing.

This garden of thorns is a brothel.

Erwin looks down at the person-- the brothel keeper, he realizes-- in shock and they grin at him before beginning to weave through the crowd. They bring Erwin to the side of the room where most of the others gather, lounging, indolent in draped silks and gauzy scarves. A few of them turn to look at him and he sees smiles.

“Take your pick, my lord,” the keeper tells him. “Any one of them can be yours for the right price.” Erwin is silent, staring. “Or you can be theirs.”

He turns to look at the keeper, unable to stand the hungry, grinning teeth of the hellishly beautiful women who had been gazing at him. “What. Um.” He doesn’t know what he wants to ask.

But they do. “What draws you to us, Mister Smith? Is it blood you want? Is it power? Is it love?” Their voice catches on the last word, turns it into something wry and ridiculous and decidedly taunting.

Erwin swallows. He doesn’t know.

He turns his head back to the women so he doesn’t have to look at the keeper anymore. They aren’t just women, he corrects himself. Only mostly. But he see too, broad chested men in vests without shirts, white-skinned, willowy youths who might almost have been boys if not for the terrible, ageless dark in their eyes.

Erwin stares at each of them in turn, and then his eyes stick.

The man is small, smaller than any other there, but there is no mistaking him for a boy. He is one of them, of course-- Erwin can see it in the unlined planes of his face, see that time has not touched him in decades, centuries, millennia. He is beautiful. Erwin doesn’t realize he’s never really understood the meaning of the word until this moment. This man is the very definition of it, the soul of it, an unflinching picture next to which all else in the world is pale gray, watery, and undefined. He turns his head and Erwin meets his eyes, stares into the heart of every undefinable terror he’s ever known and comes back to himself shaking.

“Him.”

His own voice surprises him. The keeper doesn’t flinch; Erwin is right in guessing that that particular facet of himself will not be met with surprise in this place. He hadn’t see any other men _together_ on his way in-- but one aging lady was still being doted on by a voluptuous blonde woman in a nightgown.

“Him?” The keeper’s voice _is_ sharp and surprised when she sees specifically who Erwin means. Erwin realizes his choice is seperate from the crowd, sulking, almost petulant, in the shadows. He’s dressed like a common man-- worn black pants of strong but cheap fabric, a light white shirt that looks comfortable in the summer heat, but is nothing beside the silks his companions wear. His clothing looks old, dated in style, but not overly worn.

The man turns his head and meets the keeper’s eye before he levels that devastating gaze on Erwin, and Erwin is falling or drowning, and he didn’t know, he’d read every book, scoured every corner of the earth, but he’d never, ever guessed--

“Yes. Him.” He is proud when his voice doesn’t shake.

A murmur runs through the little cluster and a few of the women turn and look at the devil to whom Erwin is suddenly, irrevocably certain he would sell his soul. The man climbs to his feet, inhumanly smooth, and stuffs his hands in his pockets. The keeper is just as quiet now as Erwin.

He doesn’t look at Erwin as he approaches. His quicksilver eyes are locked on the floor, and he glides so casually, so delicately, Erwin feels dizzy, as if the ground is moving beneath his feet and bringing them closer together, as if the man is standing still.

His eyes flick once to Erwin’s face, and then the keeper’s, and then he floats passed.

“You can negotiate the terms of your arrangement with him personally.”

Erwin is startled when the keeper speaks; he’d turned and thoughtlessly followed the man, drawn inexorably toward him like the tides to the moon.

It is all they say before Erwin leaves them behind.

He leads Erwin to a door and when he opens it, Erwin is stunned to find another long hallway, spidering away from him. This whole compound is an iceberg and the manor is only the tip.

Erwin can hear muffled sounds as the man leads him down the hall-- soft, human groans, and occasionally, sharp screams. He watches the man’s back, and it all fades. Erwin has no idea how far they walk, or for how long. He only knows the way the fabric of the white shirt ripples against the man’s flesh, only knows the almost obscene way his pants cup his backside, only knows the way he moves, so disconcertingly inhuman, Erwin wonders if he is doing it on purpose.

He finds himself in a small, impeccably clean, and quiet room. There is an old chair. A fainting couch upholstered in red velvet. A table containing candles, and another door leading away.

The man drapes himself over the fainting couch and Erwin understands he is to sit in the chair. He stands in the doorway for a long time, unwilling to tear his eyes from the lithe limbs laid against the red fabric. Overall, the man is short, small, but his legs still seem long and elegant in the high-waisted black trousers.

“Pick your fucking jaw up off the floor, old man.”

 _His voice._ Erwin doesn’t have words for it. It’s deep and hidden and curling around all the secrets Erwin would never admit he has. He isn’t even looking at Erwin when he speaks and Erwin already feels stripped bare just from hearing.

“Old man,” he hears himself reply, tone almost approximating amusement. Somehow, he knows. He _knows_ this man has watched empires crumble.

Erwin finally closes the door, and sits in the chair (blue, he realizes distantly).

He has so many questions.

And all he can say is, “What should I call you?”

“Whatever you want, sweetheart.”

It’s a taunt. Erwin knows it is. The man sounds bored with him, barely looks at him, and Erwin feels his heart breaking.

“What’s your name?” he tries again, a little more firmly.

The man rolls his eyes, and then looks Erwin in the face. “Levi.”

“Levi.” He tastes the word and decides he’s never felt anything more perfect than the shape of it in his mouth, the way it feels against his lips. He stepped into this room with so many questions. Why does he feel as if he’s already asked the only one that really matters?

“Yeah, Levi.” Levi sniffs, snorts in the back of his throat, and it’s a foul, uncouth sort of sound. “You just gonna stare at me all night or what? I got shit to do.”

“Like what?” Erwin asks curiously; he’d been sitting along in a crowded room when Erwin found him. What more could he have been doing?

Levi snorts again, but it’s laughter this time, bitter and annoyed. “Get to the point or get out of my fucking room.”

Why _was_ Erwin here?

“I’m here for answers.”

“ _Answers?”_ Levi sits up on his couch, crosses his arms over his chest and folds his legs into the seat. “Any answers I got, you don’t want to hear.”

“What are you.”

Levi grins then, sharp and feral and the hairs on the back of Erwin’s neck stand up. “A whore.”

“That’s all this is?” Erwin half whispers. He’d thought--

“What did you think you’d find here, Erwin Smith?”

Erwin feels cold, all at once, is too shocked to keep it from his face, and Levi chuckles once, bloodless and cold.

“Did you even think at all?”

“I didn’t tell you my name.”

“You told them. Maybe I heard it.”

“From the entrance?”

Levi’s sharp grin gets a little sharper and he says nothing. Erwin feels his skin pricking more the longer he stares. He looks at Levi’s flinty silver eyes, at the impossible luster of his dark hair, at the way his pale white skin almost seems to glow, and remembers distantly that moonflower are poisonous.

“What happens here?”

Levi barks with laughter and Erwin almost jumps at the sharp sound.

“Naive. You spilled blood to find us. Are you really stupid enough to walk through that door without knowing exactly what you would find?”

Erwin sits up a little straighter, hands tight on the arms of the chair. He didn’t know. He’d had no idea.

All he knows is that from the moment his parents had lied to him and told him there were no monsters hiding in the shadows, he had been determined to find one.

He is shocked to realize he has succeeded.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

Levi moves. One moment, he’s sitting on the couch, and the next, he is looming into Erwin’s space, so suddenly Erwin gasps and freezes, leaning back in his chair. Levi’s hands are on his chest, cold and _wonderful_ and Erwin’s heart is frozen too, waiting for Levi to give it permission to beat again.

He slides his hand into Erwin’s vest and when he pulls back, he’s holding the stone coin. His eyes never leave Erwin’s face.

“That’s the thing about sandstone,” he says almost gently. “It’s porous. And blood. Well.” Levi’s lips lift in an expression approximating amusement. But it doesn’t reach his eyes. Those stay flat and cold and unreachable. “Blood leaves stains you can’t always see.”

He flips the coin in the air and Erwin catches it thoughtlessly.

“The man you stole that from. His name was Taylor, I think. You see that carving?”

Erwin looks down at the coin. On one side is a series of letters Erwin still hasn’t been able to identify. On the other is a rough carving of a hand, spindly and delicate, with long nails and a ring on the middle finger. The ring has an L carved into it. “Leera gave him that coin. That _invitation._ He belonged to her. And you,” he adds, pressing the tips of his first two fingers into Erwin’s shoulder, “cut his fucking heart out.”

Erwin’s blood is pounding in his ears again, fingers cold. The coins are personalized? He’d assumed they were passed between people, bought and sold or gambled away.

“He belonged to her,” Erwin repeats.

Levi’s eyes are flat and wry and he leans into Erwin’s space again. “What do you think it is you pay us for?”

“I want to hear you say it,” Erwin says sharply, voice hoarse with what he refuses to admit is fear. “What are you?”

Levi saunters back to the couch, slowly, and sits. He says nothing and his lips are curled into a smirk so bitter and cold it’s almost a grimace.

Erwin says instead, “Why?”

He can’t make it fit in his head. They’re beautiful and horrifying and--and _powerful_ and… they’re just here to be used? Or they let themselves be?

Levi’s expression is almost thoughtful, then. “It’s a useful arrangment,” he says finally. “You come to us. We drink. And we… make you _feel good._ No one dies,” he adds quietly.

“That’s not why I’m here,” Erwin tells him.

“No?” Levi replies, and a little voice in Erwin’s head asks, _Then why are you looking at him like that?_

Levi raises one brow as if he can see into Erwin’s head and Erwin hates it when he feels himself blush. He says softly, “No.”

“That would make you unique then,” Levi answers. “And also a fucking idiot.”

His rough tactless words spoken in that sickeningly attractive voice are _doing things_ to Erwin. He wants to sit here and listen to Levi talk all night. He wants to hear him--

No. He doesn’t. That was never why he came here. He’d just wanted, _needed_ to see, to know they existed, to confirm with his own two eyes what he’d known in the blackest pit of his soul was true.

“Are there others like you?”

“Like me?” Levi scoffs. Erwin understands. Of course not.

The silence is thin and brittle. Erwin wanted answers, but now he can think of nothing he’d wanted to know before he stepped through those doors. Now, the only questions he can think of are about the man in front of him.

“You were. Human once?”

Levi shrugs, eyes going flat and dark. He scratches his chin and looks away, bored by Erwin’s prying. “Technically. Yes. Philosophically…” he trails off.

“How did you…”

Levi stands then, and Erwin falls silent instantly, watching Levi like a rabid dog as he weaves closer. He puts both hands on the arms of the chair, leans into Erwin’s space, and inhales. He’s so close Erwin has to press himself into his chair to avoid touching him, so close Erwin can smell the strange, sweet chill of his breath, can tell how clean his hair is.

“You know everything you wanted to know,” Levi says quietly. “We’re here. That’s why you came, isn’t it?”

Erwin doesn’t like to lie under the best of circumstances, but he _can’t_ when Levi is looking at him like that. He nods, very slowly, and can’t bring himself to speak.

“You’re not like the others,” Levi says firmly, almost as if confirming it to himself. “Not here for sex or fantasies or power.” He tilts his head, short hair falling into his eyes, and mutters, “You just wanted to know.”

Erwin wets his lips, unable to tear his eyes away.

“Fine,” Levi tells him. He lifts one arm, lays his bloodlessly cold hand against Erwin’s jaw and Erwin is utterly paralyzed, pinned in place by those long, sure fingers. The lightest pressure tells Erwin to tilt his chin, to turn his head and-- expose the long curve of his neck to Levi’s unblinking gaze. And he does. He can’t stop himself, though he knows he’s never been more terrified in his life. Levi’s going to kill him. So many people have come here and never been seen again. Erwin is going to be one of them. “I’ll show you.”

The chair creaks; Erwin is clenching the arms so tightly, he might break them apart, but he can’t make himself stop. Levi’s hand, the one not twisting Erwin’s head on his neck, slides onto his knee, moves up to his hip, feather light and so strong Erwin knows if he moved at all, Levi would pin him in place with little more than a thought.

Levi’s head dips, lips parting, so Erwin can’t see his face anymore.

He’s going to die. He’s _going_ to die and what’s more, he _wants_ to. He doesn’t care, he’s lost, and he wants… he just _wants._

He hears Levi hum to himself, a casual, pleased little sound, and feels the air against his neck shift with the way Levi is holding himself so close, but not yet touching him. It is a moment that lasts too long, that stretches torturously thin until Erwin is desperate for action, for some indication that he hasn’t died already, that this isn’t his own personal hell, pinched between Levi’s clever fingers for eternity, waiting to be used.

Why did Erwin pick him? There were men enough, in silks like gauzy confections. But he hadn’t come here to buy a whore-- a woman would have suited his needs, could have answered all his questions. He had reached into a basket of garden snakes and plucked out the only viper.

His lips are so cold, Erwin actually sighs when they touch him, eyes fluttering closed against his will. The summer night was hot. His pulsing blood is hotter still, and everything he is is curled into the spaces where Levi is touching him, the hand on his chin, and on his waist, the lips at his neck. He feels them part, feels the smooth wet slide of Levi’s teeth, and feels the moment his skin tears like peach flesh.

His hands go slack on the chair. Levi doesn’t have to hold his chin in place anymore-- his head falls, limp, to his shoulder, and leaves him open, _willing-- and_ \--

His breath hitches, voice catching in his throat, and he can’t stop the _sound,_ the utterly obscene, thoroughly debauched _whine_ leaking from between his lips, and he _didn’t know,_ he’d _never guessed._

There _is_ pain, sharp and cold and hard to ignore, but there is more, a feeling of usefulness, of _intimacy_ he has never come close to, of finally, _finally_ finding his place, of the sheer unbreakable bond of spilled blood.

There is a sound, a gulp, followed by a slick smack that is easily one of the filthiest things Erwin has ever heard, and Levi’s hands tighten on him, _Levi_ groans against Erwin’s skin so Erwin can _feel_ it, and all at once, he’s climbing into Erwin’s lap like an animal lunging for a carcass, fingernails digging into Erwin’s skin like he’s afraid Erwin might run.

Erwin can’t move at all, except to lift his hands to Levi’s waist, to hold him and be blissfully thankful that this is how he gets to die.

He knows something is wrong. Levi had been too calm, too controlled, and now, it’s like something in him has snapped. This isn’t what he wanted, Erwin knows it isn’t what Levi had planned at all, and that, more than anything, scares him. But it is distant, secondary to the blood singing under his skin, all of it surging to the place Levi is kissing ( _kissing?)_ and Erwin had no idea any part of his skin could feel so _good._

His head spins. Levi groans greedily against him again, knees wedged into the chair alongside Erwin’s, his hips pressed indecently against Erwin’s chest.

He’s going to die.

The thought occurs to him again, and this time, it is not a vague, shadowy concept hovering at his periphery. It is the impossibly sinuous man trying to slither under his skin. It is solid, and cold, and addictive and he is holding it in his hands, in his _lap_.

“Wait.”

Erwin’s voice comes out shallow and weak. Just thinking the word had been a struggle. But to say it?

His body rebels, self preservation making his hands move though his mind doesn’t want them to. He fights. He tries to push Levi away, tries to buck his hips, and Levi’s hands are all over him, brushing him off, slapping him away--

Levi jerks, hisses like a wild cat, and falls to the floor. Erwin follows him, hits his knees and crumbles in a heap. The chair overturns, slides across the floor, and when he lifts his eyes, dizzily, he finds Levi panting, blood on his lips and his eyes pure silver, holding his hand to his chest. He is staring at Erwin in wild, animal shock, and as Erwin looks at him, Levi’s eyes drop in cold, predatory understanding to the pocket watch dangling from Erwin’s waistcoat, the backside turned out so the raised lines of the cross engraved in the silver is unmistakable.

Erwin feels his own blood running down his neck onto his shoulder, so hot when Levi’s lips had been so cold. He claps a hand to the spot, chest heaving, but when he tries to push himself to his feet, he stumbles, weak kneed and clumsy. He’s dizzy; the room is spinning.

Levi’s eyes clear, the irises shrinking until Erwin can see the whites again. He bares his sharp teeth in a taunting snarl, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. Those are… shocked. Confused.

Erwin gets his feet under him, and he runs, stumbles, bloody, into the hallway.

When he bursts into the main room, there is laughter, all of it aimed at him, and gleaming teeth and sharp, curling nails. No one stops him.

His brain is nothing but a white hot panic until he bursts outside, falls on the front steps and slams his knee into the paving stones. He realizes he’s left his shoes, his sword, his coat, inside, and as he rolls onto his back to scramble away, he sees he didn’t shut the door behind him.

There is more laughter. The keeper. A few of the women from the room.

Levi is not laughing. He stands, framed by the doorway, and wordlessly hurls Erwin’s things at him. His shirt is torn open, blood staining the front, and he is favoring his right hand. His hair is messy, falling in his eyes, but Erwin can still see them. He is still, pressed into the dirt in front of the manor, surrounded by the smell of moonflowers and death and blood.

Levi licks his lips, and the women beside and behind him keep laughing. Levi is not laughing.

“Any more _questions,_ Mister Smith?”

Erwin staggers to his feet, tries to collect his shoes and his sword and his coat, his pathetic garlic blossoms and his knife.

Levi’s lips curl in a snarl and he drags the back of his hand over his mouth. Then he slams the door shut.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is just dominating my brain at this point. I have like five wips and all I can think about is vampire Levi and his long sad life. Someone help me.
> 
> No but really, you are all WONDERFUL and thank you so much for your kudos and comments! New fandoms are intimidating and you have all been so lovely and welcoming it just warms me to my core ok? Thank you thank you thank you! <3

The servants are horrified when Erwin limps, weak limbed and bloody, through his door. They think he has been fighting again, and he keeps his collar turned up high to hide the source of the scarlet stains coloring his clothing.

The next morning his neck is one enormous, mottled bruise and he can’t turn his head without feeling it. He’s nauseated just thinking about it-- how close he came to ruin. He sleeps, and he tries to forget. 

He cannot forget. Levi haunts his dreams. He is the shadow chasing Erwin in the dark. He is the siren call Erwin knows he must answer. He awakes drenched in a cold sweat and painfully hard and prickling with gooseflesh. He awakes with the spot in his neck where Levi had marked him pulsing even more fervently than his cock. He awakes sick with want and terror.

He returns to his books. He rereads his translations, searching for places where he might have confused ‘desire’ for ‘attraction.’ The two are not the same, he realizes. Attraction is animal-- a bee to a brightly colored flower, a mutt to a bitch, a moth to a flame. This is something else. The moth doesn’t dream of the flame when the candle has been snuffed out. 

His skin heals-- the puncture at his neck, the scrape on his knee. His neck heals faster, and heals well; the marks are light and white and easy to hide. The moon grows and thins and grows again, and Erwin’s face is gaunt when he looks in the mirror. The servants avoid him, whisper about him when they think he’s not there, talk about the way he moans in his sleep. 

He keeps reading, and when he finds a passage that speaks of falling into the vampire’s thrall, he rejoices. Surely, this is what Levi has done. Made Erwin  _ need  _ him. It  _ is _ animal. It is chemical. Erwin could no more ignore it than the tides could ignore the moon. 

The keeper is surprised to see him. Erwin can tell when they open the door and look him over from head to toe. 

“Mister Smith.” 

He wordlessly hands them the coin, and their lips purse. “This isn’t yours.” 

“I want to see him.”

“That’s not how this works,” they taunt. “ _ He  _ doesn’t wish to see  _ you.”  _

“How do you know? Tell him I’m here.” 

They laugh. “He knows.” 

And they send him away without returning the carved sandstone.

He comes back the next night, and the night after that, and the night after that. He sees other men, rich men, powerful men, being led inside. They look at him curiously, but they never speak to him. He stops leaving his horse off the path, rides it right up to the paving stones.

After two weeks, they open the door and look down at him with their arms crossed over their chest. He’d stopped knocking a week ago, simply sat on the steps and waited.

He looks at them, and without another word, they step aside. 

He follows them into the room with the coats and they sit at a desk, motion that he should sit too. There is one stiff, empty chair waiting.

Erwin sits. 

“You’re persistent,” they tell him. 

Erwin doesn’t speak, and they offer one amused, half-crazed giggle before reaching into a drawer in their desk and drawing out a long, worn piece of parchment rolled into a tube. 

“There are rules in this place, Mister Smith,” they tell him. “Your first… visit with us was a one time offer. If you’d like to return, there are terms you will agree to.”

“Name them.” 

They unroll their scroll and Erwin sees a contract written in red ink. At the bottom are signatures, the dark rusty color of which tells Erwin immediately that they were signed in blood. 

“This coin,” they say, holding one up (it is darker, carved differently than the one Erwin had first used), “is a gift. It is for you only. You will forfeit it when you walk through the door. If you behave and abide by our rules, it will be returned to you when you leave. You will not share it with another person. You will not trade it or sell it or gamble it away. Do you agree to these terms?” 

Erwin nods, mouth dry, and they hold out the coin. It seems… older than the one he had had before, the sandstone worn and smooth and dark with use. On one side, he sees the same letters that had been carved in Leera’s. On the other, he sees two angel wings, and hidden at the very bottom, in the outline of one of the feathers, he sees a tiny ‘L.’

“You will pay a fee each time you come. You will further arrange payment with whomever you choose to...interact with.” 

Erwin furrows his brows. “I don’t--”

“If you wish to sleep with one of our girls. Or. Boys,” they add, blinking owlishly at him, “You will pay them for it directly,” the keeper says deliberately. “If you wish to engage in a roleplay or serve someone, you will negotiate a price and pay them directly. No one is obligated to agree to be with you. Agreement to a certain act one night does not guarantee that person will be willing to enact the same act on another. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” 

“You are a guest in our home, Mister Smith. The terms of this contract are binding. If you break any one of them, you forfeit your coin. If the offense is egregious enough, you forfeit your life.”

Erwin narrows his eyes. “And what protects me?”

The keeper huffs a laugh. “Lord Ackerman does.”

“Who--”

“We all agree to his terms, just as you will. If you are… threatened in a way you did not explicitly agree to, you may report it to me. But I can assure you, my people follow these rules to the letter. We like it here. We are rarely willing to risk our room for the likes of one of  _ you.”  _

Erwin looks down, considering their words. “And what about what has already been done to me?” he asks them. “I didn’t agree to that.”

“What’s been done?” they muse. 

Erwin tugs at the collar of his shirt and shows them the smooth white scars, the unmistakable outline of Levi’s teeth. The keeper stands so quickly, Erwin’s heart leaps into his throat. They lean forward, push his head to one side with on hand and yank down the collar of his shirt with the other, a curious hum on their lips. Erwin grunts at the assault and tries to shove them away but they are  _ very  _ strong. 

“These are deep. He. Attacked you?” 

Erwin pauses. Hadn’t they seen him race from the room with Levi, bloody lipped, chasing after him? He nods. 

They let him go and sit back. Erwin cracks his neck once as they furrow their brows and he knows they don’t quite believe him. But they still smile serenely and say, “You never signed. You were bound to and protected by nothing.”

Erwin nods. That seems fair. 

He signs the contract in his own blood. “Blood is a bond,” they tell him with a smile. And then they add, “And now we know how to find you.”

“Find me?”

They grin, the expression manic, cheerful, and utterly feral, and inhale deeply, head bent over the paper. They release the breath like they had been inhaling the perfume of a flower, and say, “Lovely.”

Erwin can’t help but shiver. 

The path to the room isn’t as empty as it was the night Erwin arrived. He sees skirts disappearing around corners, hears casual conversation coming from the rooms above him. All is quiet once more as they lead Erwin into the dark staircase. 

“What do I call you?” He whispers but his voice still sounds too loud. 

“Hanji.” 

“You. Enforce the rules here?”

They look over their shoulder and grin. “If I must.”

There is something in the answer that confuses Erwin, that tells him Hanji is only revealing a portion of the truth. They hold the final door open for him, and don’t follow him through. 

He stands, at first, in front of the door, unwilling to move. Levi is not here. He knows the moment the door closes that he won’t find that devastating face looming in the shadows this night. He sees some faces he recognizes, from the time before, and some he does not. There are less guests now, and less of the others, the residents, the… It seems strange to think the word when he is staring at them. Alone in his home, it is easy to speak of demons and sirens and gods, easy to speak of myths when there is no real proof they ever lived. 

But now he is staring at them.  _ They  _ are staring at  _ him.  _

He wants to leave. Levi isn’t here. 

He forces himself to stay for a few moments longer, to look around more closely. There is a small cluster of people to his right-- three otherworldly women and one painfully mundane man. They crawl all over him, smiling at him, trailing their fingers along his skin, and one by one they lower their mouths to his body. Erwin looks away. He sees a fit man with a bare chest leading a woman with graying hair into the hallway with all the rooms. She isn’t old, not really, but she looks washed out beside him. Another couple emerges from the same door, he looking heavy lidded and sated, she with a wry smile on her lips and dark bruises around her throat that fade as Erwin watches. 

His stomach coils in understanding. Hanji had spoken of  _ role plays  _ and  _ supplies _ , of terms and conditions. If it suited him he could pay for violence committed against a willing partner with immortality as a shield.  _ Not fantasies or power,  _ Levi had said. 

The woman kisses her partner on the cheek in a gentle, affectionate touch, and sends him on his way. He passes Erwin and Erwin sees blood at his sleeve. When he looks back up, she swipes her hand over her own throat, shakes her shoulders loose, and walks off. 

“You’re a pretty one.”

Erwin didn’t hear this one approach and he starts visibly when he catches sight of her at his side. She giggles. She is tall, taller than most women Erwin has met, and fit, in the sense that he can see the muscle corded in her bare arms. She has dark, olive skin, and dark hair and dark eyes. It is her eyes that make him guess she is young. Hanji’s eyes had felt like they belonged in an old person, wrinkled and blue with age. Levi’s had been unfathomable. 

“We don’t get many men who look like you around here,” she tells him, lifting a hand and tracing her finger along Erwin’s jaw. “Mostly weak-chinned boys who like to play or withered old men who like to dream. You are neither of those things.” She squeezes Erwin’s chin in her hand, and his brain churns. Looking at her, hearing her speak. It is nothing like looking and hearing Levi. And he wonders…

He catches her wrist. She is beautiful, not unfriendly-- but he doesn’t like her touching him. 

She tilts her head, but doesn’t pull away. “What’s your name, gorgeous?” The pet name feels oddly like a taunt coming from her lips, or a wry sarcasm he’s not meant to understand.

“Erwin.”

“Erwin.” He sees her nostrils flare, and then her tongue runs along the outsides of her teeth. “Anybody ever tell you you smell good, Erwin?” 

His stomach boils. This feeling, this need to hurl himself at her feet-- it’s not as strong as it is with Hanji. But it’s so different from Levi, it makes Erwin sick to feel it. It’s unnatural. It’s her will, pressing against him. 

“Who do you belong to, Erwin?” 

He blinks at her.  _ Belong to?  _

When he stares, she chuckles. “Who invited you in.”

_ Hanji,  _ his brain supplies. “Levi,” his lips say. 

“ _ Levi?”  _ she says sharply, as if Erwin has told her a ridiculous joke. She reaches forward to try to catch his chin again, and he stops her unthinkingly with a hand on her wrist. “Don’t lie to me.” 

Erwin furrows his brows. Why would he lie?

She drops her hand, face smooth with incredulity, perhaps even a touch of disgust and she says again, “ _ Levi?”  _ Then she steps away from him, as if he is something filthy, a shiny bauble she spotted in the dirt only to realize upon closer inspection was nothing but crumpled garbage.

“I want--” he begins to say. He’s not sure how to say it. He wants her to tear his flesh like Levi had, he wants to prove to himself that they are all capable of that, that it wasn’t just Levi, that it could have been anyone. 

But she exhales sharply, and shakes her head. Without another word, she leaves him, still standing by the entrance. His heart is sprinting in his chest again. 

He leaves. 

He comes back. Every night for a week, he walks in, knows Levi isn’t there, and walks out again. He pays his fee each time, a small fortune, but it’s not as if he can’t spare it. Hanji only curls their lips at him in pity and holds out their hand for his money and the angel wings. 

When he isn’t riding out of the city in the dead of night, or sleeping late into the day, he studies his texts, and he stares at his stone coin. He turns it over in his hands. He runs his thumb over it until he knows every divot and groove in its surface, and it becomes a comfort. Every night, when Hanji puts it back in his hands, he feels as if they are returning a piece of him that he cannot live for long without. 

“Are you scared to stay?”

When he steps into the room this time, it is a voluptuous blonde women with a cherub’s lips and pale apples in her cheeks who finally breaks the silence he has been living in. 

“You come every night, but you never stay,” she muses. Erwin stares at her and wonders if the tall, fit woman has told her who he is. She wasn’t there the night he first came-- and as he looks around, he realizes most of the faces are unfamiliar. He’s come to understand that these people come and go. He might see one face for days and never again. Often they spend their evenings confined to the rooms webbing out from this one. He has no idea how many of them use this place, but this room never seems to contain more than a couple dozen. Once, he counted less than a handful. “Do we frighten you so?” she asks with a lovely, innocent smile. 

“Yes,” Erwin answers. 

“Who invited you?” 

He knows now that this is courtesy. He’s heard the question asked a dozen times before, and he’s listened each time as a name was offered. Sometimes the name turns the asker away-- most of the time it does not. Most of the time it is met with a smile, a tease (“She does like the tall ones!” and “You don’t look like his usual catch.  _ You  _ must be  _ special.”).  _ Erwin has not given anyone the chance to ask him since that first night back. 

“Hanji,” he tries. He knows better now, then to tell her the truth. 

She frowns. “Hanji? Where did you two meet?”

Erwin shrugs. “Around.”

“Hmm,” she hums in interest. She is sweet and soft at all her edges, all roundness and curves, the gentle slope of her chin nothing like the cut glass of Levi’s. He feels strange, when he lets her take his hand, looks around almost self consciously for the men in the room, even though what he wants is nothing remotely sexual. Or at least it shouldn’t be. 

She takes him to a room-- it’s smaller than the one he’d been in with Levi, and doesn’t have another room leading off it. Instead of fainting couches and armchairs, the wooden floor is sparklingly clean and covered in silk throws and pillows. Her hands are gentle. She smiles. 

Erwin tells her what he wants, in halting words with too much heat in his cheeks. They agree on a price. He knows before her lips have touched his skin (his wrist, he decides; letting her mark him where Levi had feels too strange, too much like a betrayal) that it will not be the same. This woman has no effect on him. 

He feels only pain, a pinch, and a surge of annoyance. He wants to shake her off of him like a buzzing mosquito. She’s far gentler than Levi had been, far softer and more delicate, and Erwin hates her. 

His skin itches where she touches him, and he waits impatiently for her to finish, jaw clenching as the seconds pass. When she lifts her head, rolling her lips in sweet modesty to catch any drop she may have missed, she looks at him and sees him glaring. She frowns and, eyes crinkling in confusion and concern, says, “Is something wro--”

A scream pierces the air, sharp and high and horribly pained. Erwin has been here often enough to know this is abnormal, and he’s on his feet before he can think better of it, hurling himself into the hallway and toward the awful sound. He tears a short spear of wood from where he has hidden it in his trousers as he runs; Hanji had missed it that first night, and every night since.

He’s aware, dimly, that others are spilling out into the hall, shouting to each other, moving so abnormally, Erwin feels as if he is looking at a flip book illustration with pages missing. He ignores them all, flings himself into the room beside his, and somehow, miraculously, is the first person to arrive there. 

He finds a man standing in a pile of ash, alone. There’s blood on his hands, and whoever screamed is nowhere to be found, but Erwin knows this man is dangerous, has broken the rules, has done something awful, and all the cogs in his head slow as he assesses the situation. The man is victorious, holding a weapon, a sharp piece of wood just like Erwin is. It looks as if he has broken the foot off an end table. He’s shaking the blood from his hands, and the ashes, and he still hasn’t lifted his head, hasn’t looked up to see who burst into the room. Erwin approaches him from the side, flings himself forward and the man’s face cracks when he sees. He swipes with his wood and Erwin catches him, hurls him to the floor, puts his knee in the man’s back, james the point of his weapon into the base of the man’s skull, just hard enough to sting--

People flash into the room, appearing with the speed with which Erwin might snuff a candle. They tear him from the man, pin him to the ground, shake his weapon from his hand, and there is shouting, there is chaos, there is ash in his mouth and nose--

Everything goes quiet at once. Levi is standing in the doorway. 

His eyes are storm clouds, sparking lighting and he stares at the man Erwin had attacked. 

“Who let him in.” 

Hanji appears at his side, staring at the attacker in utter horror. There are tears in their eyes. “She did, he was hers,” they whisper, with one hand pressed to their lips. 

And then Erwin understands where the ash comes from, what he is choking on. He tries desperately not to breathe it in.

The attacker is released; he scrambles to his feet and faces Levi, and Erwin can tell from the set of Levi’s shoulders, from the way everyone stands away from him, from his simple clothes and his hands clenched into fists that he had lied to Erwin that night.

He is not a whore.

He is a bodyguard. 

Levi cracks his neck. Erwin shivers; everyone else is watching the two men with murder in their eyes and no one seems to notice Erwin at all.

“They’ll come for you,” the attacker tells him, voice shaking. “We’re… coming for you.” 

Levi sniffs. His eyes are ticking around the room, and he bends suddenly, lifts the man’s shard of wood. It is the size of Erwin’s fist and it had skittered across the floor, landed at Levi’s feet, in all the chaos. He spins it in his hands, twirls it between his long, capable fingers, and stares at it before he lifts his head again.

Levi bares his teeth in an awful smile and they are sharp and white in the dim candle light. 

It is over  _ so  _ quickly. Erwin feels sick just watching it. One moment the two men are facing each other, the next, as if Erwin had blinked and opened his eyes on a new scene, Levi has his hand in the attacker’s hair, has wrenched his head back and is  _ jamming  _ the piece of wood into the man’s neck, once, twice-- Erwin wants to look away, but he can’t. The man shrieks, then gurgles, all his red blood spraying onto Levi’s white skin, and Levi spins the shard of wood one last time before he buries it in the center of the man’s chest. His nose is inches from the attacker’s cheek when he whispers, soft, as if to a lover, “Can’t wait.”

Erwin watches Levi watch him die. 

A shameful swell of… Erwin can’t name it, refuses to, but it surges in his chest as he watches Levi lick a splatter of blood from his lips, and then the back of his wrist. He is drenched in red. It’s puddling on the floor, oozing toward Erwin, and his head is  _ pounding  _ with shame and rage and something utterly  _ obscene  _ as he watches. 

Levi drops his hands, lets the body fall to the floor with a dense thud. He licks his fingers clean then makes a face, like he has tasted something foul.  

Erwin guesses Levi knew he was there the whole time; perhaps, by the way Erwin is being held down, he had simply assumed he had two attackers to deal with. But he hadn't actually looked.

Shock colors his face when he sees who Erwin is and his obscenely deep voice is hoarse when he says, “What is he--”

Then he stops, nostrils flaring, and Erwin is certain if Levi’s heart pumped blood, he would have watched it all drain from Levi’s face at that moment. 

Erwin’s wrist, the one that’s still bleeding, is pinned in place above his head. Levi can see it and the shadow that passes in front of his face is so terrible, Erwin thinks his heart could freeze just from looking. 

The expression is gone so quickly, Erwin could have imagined it. His face is flat and cold when he asks Erwin, “Having fun?”

Erwin wants to pummel him, wants to scream at him, wants to-- no. Not that. He wants to make Levi  _ suffer  _ for what he’s done to Erwin, wants to make Levi feel every moment Erwin lived without him. 

“No,” he whispers back.

Levi face twitches, a moment of surprise. Of…  _ relief.  _ And then it is gone too.

“You’ve cursed me.” Erwin gets his feet under him and kneels, fury suddenly surging in his chest. That Levi can stand there looking  _ like that,  _ that he can just-- he’s ignored Erwin for  _ weeks  _ and now-- “Demon.” 

Someone hisses, a tiny whisper of sound, and Erwin realizes for the first time that they are not alone; he’d forgotten. The room is silent. Everyone can see. 

His throat feels hot, a horrible flush that crawls up his chest and over his cheeks. Levi plays at coolness, leans back on his heels and tugs at his sticky red shirt before he stands and shoves his hands in his pockets. 

“Why is he here,” he says again, voice so soft Erwin almost can’t hear him. There is silence; no one knows. 

“He heard her scream,” the blonde who had taken Erwin’s money speaks from the doorway and her voice is soft. She is… utterly terrified. When Levi looks at her, she flinches. “I didn’t know,” she adds,  _ very  _ quietly. “He-- he told me  _ Hanji--”  _ Erwin’s stomach squirms.

Levi’s shoulders, tight and hard under his once white shirt, settle, and he sniffs again before he drags the back of his hand across his lips. His voice is smooth when he says, “Didn’t know what?” and the girl seems to sag in relief. Erwin’s rage crests and it takes everything in him to hold his tongue. 

Levi’s eyes tick around the room again. Someone quietly holds out the wood Erwin had been holding. “He had this.” 

Levi takes it, studies it carefully, so unlike the way he’d looked at the other man’s weapon. 

“How the fuck did you get this through the door?” he demands.

Erwin looks around. No one has moved to hold onto him; he doesn’t remember when they let him go. He stands. When he peers passed Levi’s shoulder, Hanji’s face is pinched in shock. Erwin lays one hand on himself, on the space on his inner thigh where he had strapped the weapon down. Hanji’s eyes squeeze shut in understanding, and they drop their head. When Erwin speaks, he feels like he is betraying them. 

“It’s the only spot Hanji doesn’t check,” he mutters. He can tell by the way that Levi turns and looks at them that they are supposed to check every part of him-- modesty had kept their hands light and low, brushing a space just above Erwin’s knee and going no higher along the inseam. 

Levi stares in silence at the piece of wood. Then he clenches his fist and it shatters into splinters. His voice is strange, tight, when he says, “Get him out of here.”

Erwin’s head spins. Hanji is in charge. Hanji enforces the rules, why is everyone looking at Levi like he’s--

He feels someone grab him by the shoulder, and Levi’s words finally sink in. “ _ No.”  _

Levi starts to stroll, casual, from the room, sparing only a glance at the body on the floor. But his shoulders are too tight. “And clean this mess up.” 

The hand on Erwin’s shoulder tightens. 

Erwin doesn’t consider what he is doing when he uses all his strength to shove them away. “You will speak to me,” he hears himself demand, slipping, without meaning to, into the kind of command he usually saves for servants or insolent peers who overestimate their worth to him. He’s reaching out, putting his hand on Levi’s shoulder. “You  _ will  _ listen--” 

He doesn’t see it happen. One minute, he is holding Levi by the shoulder, the next every single person in the room is holding him down while he struggles and rages. He is  _ very  _ strong but they are stronger. Levi lifts his brows and sinks into a squat, knees splayed wide and Erwin goes mostly still again, horribly, foolishly, obscenely aware of the way Levi’s blood drenched clothes pull across his body. Erwin is breathing heavy, hair in his eyes as he stares and Levi’s expression is as inscrutable as always. 

“You fucking shithead nobles with your goddamn demands. You break my rules, you’re lucky I don’t break your fucking neck.” 

_ My rules.  _

Erwin blinks at him. 

He sticks his finger in Erwin’s face. “ _ You  _ signed my contract.” 

Erwin swallows. “Yes.” 

“ _ You  _ brought this shit into my house.” As Levi speaks he flicks a splinter lying at his feet at Erwin’s face; Erwin flinches when it hits him. 

“I tried to help her,” he growls back, renewing his struggle. His shoulders are pressed more firmly to the ground but he is satisfied when someone grunts with the effort. 

Levi’s flat eyes narrow. “Why do you keep coming back here?”

The question startles Erwin so badly, he actually stops fighting and just stares.  _ Why?  _

He opens his mouth to say  _ You know why  _ and  _ You did this  _ and  _ It’s all your fault  _ and instead he says nothing at all. 

“You like paying to look at us, is that it? Remind you you’re still human?” 

Erwin can’t answer, not with everyone watching, so he starts to struggle again and actually manages, for one second, to get his chest off the ground before Levi reaches out and flicks him on the nose like a naughty dog and Erwin is so stunned, and so  _ livid  _ all at once, he goes completely still again and just stares. 

Levi stares back. Then he shakes his head, more to himself than for anyone else’s benefit, and says, “See him out. You,” he adds, pointing at Hanji without meeting their eyes, “Bring me his sigil once he’s gone.” 

“Yes, sir,” they say quietly. 

“ _ No!”  _ He’s struggling again, furious and vicious as he’s hauled to his feet, as he’s manhandled out into the hallway, as Levi strolls back toward the main room. People, the demons and their guests alike, are already lining the halls, poking their heads from doorways, drawn by the noise. He hears himself call, “ _ Levi,”  _ and “ _ Get back here, you bastard,”  _ and finally,  _ “Release me! Free me from this hell!” _

Levi halts. Erwin watches his back and knows he has revealed more of himself than he ever meant to. 

He is dragged closer, until Levi is standing right in front of him.

“I’m not holding your leash,” he says very quietly without turning around. “Don’t blame me because you’re desperate to know what lives in the shadows.” 

They throw him out of the building again, screaming, raging all the way, and they don’t return his coin. When he stands, throws himself forward and rips open the door, there is a flash of light, a blinding burning pain, and he finds himself laying in the dirt on the street. They watch him from the walkway; he can’t pass the threshold and it is only after he has run at the invisible barricade four times that he remembers. 

Levi had called the coin a sigil. 

And sigils hold magic.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oof Apparently I'm going a month between updates with this one?! That's sad. I've def been staring at this chapter for literally the past two weeks now going "Wow I should post that. That's ready to be posted." 
> 
> Wedding planning is stressful, y'all, it's taking over all my thought processes when really all I want to think about is Levi and Erwin and all the tragic emotional sex they should be having. 
> 
> Send help.

Erwin reads. Erwin sleeps after the sun rises, awakes before it has set, and reads every hour in between. He forgets to eat. The servants whisper. 

He learns the letters in the language he didn’t know are symbols of power. He learns everything there is to know about wards and shields, and he learns that if he doesn’t obtain a coin, he will never walk through their doors again; to break them requires power and knowledge he doesn’t possess, and even then, to pit his own power against Levi’s--  _ Lord Ackermen,  _ he thinks almost wryly, picturing Levi’s common clothes, hearing his rough accent and rougher words-- is pure foolishness.

He’s not sure why he thinks Levi is the one the who cast the spells; he just does. He is sure of it. 

There is nothing else for it. He must retrieve a sigil stone. He must find a vampire.

He knows what they look like now, knows how to spot them. He combs the streets looking for them, scans every face at parties he wasn’t invited to, wanders down dark alleys alone and tempts fate. 

He starts to notice them first at the parties. He still receives invitations, on occasion, as a courtesy; no one expects him to actually go, so when he starts darkening doorways in his best suits with his hair combed back and dark circles under his eyes, at first, people are stunned. He rekindles old acquaintances. He follows them around town to the places he hasn’t been invited; no one would ever think of turning him away, invitation or no. He dances with pretty girls. He stares at pretty boys when he hopes no one is looking and hates how none of them even come close to Levi. And then he feels foolish because he knows there is no one,  _ no one,  _ living or dead who can truly compare to Levi. He knows it, in the pit of his chest, knows that he could live a century, could scour every corner of the earth, and never find someone so… so capable. Capable of haunting his dreams, of ripping a man’s throat out, of blazing hotter than a star and setting Erwin’s chest aflame. 

Hunting them down is easier than it should be, once he’s spotted them. He smiles and flirts. He lays on every charm he knows, and still goes home empty handed. He guesses that the ones he sees at parties are Levi’s, that this is how they find their prey, find hands to slide stones into. And they want nothing to do with Erwin. At first, he thinks it’s because they know him, recognize him. But then he sees the ones they dote on-- the quiet and subdued, the aging and the awkward, the wealthy that other wealthy people pity and whisper about behind their hands. Erwin does not fit that description-- the rumors whispered about him are not based in pity. He is not past his prime or clinging to a dwindling fortune. He isn’t a widower or a henpecked cuckold. He knows how to make people laugh and smile, how to make them trust him. 

He considers finding a man to chase. He’s unmarried and that alone already raises eyebrows. If he had one glass of wine too many, left his hand on a muscular shoulder too long, laughed too loudly, stood too close-- perhaps  _ those  _ rumors would tempt one of them to him. 

But he can’t bring himself to do it-- every time he tries he thinks of Levi and feels like a traitor.

That is when he starts wandering the streets. He walks for hours, in the roughest parts of town and the cleanest, down dark dirty alleys and behind well-swept shops. A few times, he feels eyes on his back and he slows down, tries to coax out whoever is watching. 

Once, someone tries to rob him and he cracks the man’s skull against a brick wall and leaves him unconscious in a pile of garbage. When he lifts his head and shakes his hair out of his eyes, he swears he sees a strawberry blonde head disappearing into a shadow, but when he looks again, he sees nothing but darkness. 

The first time he finds one alone, he knows it is not one of Levi’s. He finds it in an alley by the docks, and it reeks of dirt and salt water and blood. He rounds a corner and sees it there, in the midst of murdering a man. It jerks up when it hears him, blood running in sloppy rivulets form its mouth, and stares at him like a wild animal as he considers what to do. Then the man it’s holding groans and the choice seems clear. Erwin shakes the wooden blade from its sheath at his wrist (he would never be so foolish as to search for one unarmed) and makes short work of it. It’s  _ strong,  _ much stronger than he is, but he knew it would be. He lets it lunge for him, plays at terror, and it notices the wood in his hand a second too late. It crumbles into ash and Erwin is thankful it is so much easier than killing a man. It doesn’t even bleed. 

He drags the unconscious victim out of the alley and leaves him where he will be found. He tells himself he is imagining the flash of red-blonde hair that disappears over the lip of a nearby roof when he lifts his head. 

The next night, the streets seem quieter, emptier, than usual, and as Erwin slips behind a row of shops, he sees a woman at the end of the street. She is stunning, otherwordly, with pale skin and a loosely fitting dress in pale green. Her hair practically glows in the moonlight, an unmistakable strawberry blonde. 

Erwin is running after her the moment he sees her, and she is  _ so fast.  _ Her feet don’t make any sound as she moves, and she is disappearing around the corner before he has taken one step. He chases her anyway and sees her at the end of every street, until finally, when he is sure he can run no more, he rounds a corner and she is there, waiting at a dead end. 

She is not alone.

Hanji leans against the brick wall, their eyes completely obscured by the moonlight on their glasses, one booted foot supporting their weight against the wall. Erwin feels a strange flash of relief and fear at once. Being alone with these two people could never truly be safe-- but he’d rather die by Hanji’s hand than a stranger’s. He puts one hand on the wall, gasping for breath, and the woman in green throws her arms over her head in a playful stretch. Erwin understands at once. 

“How ya doing, Eyebrow?”

“You had her… follow me,” he pants at Hanji, putting his back to the wall to catch his breath; he is not much of a runner and the short sprinted made his lungs and legs burn. 

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” Hanji deadpans. 

“Would that bother you?”

Hanji shrugs. 

“Why?” Erwin demands. 

Hanji smirks and shakes their head. “I knew you couldn’t stay away. A man like you would rather die than live life without knowing… whatever the fuck it is you’re so desperate to know.” 

“What’ll it take to get me back in?” 

Hanji shakes their head again. “There’s no  _ going back,  _ Lord Smith. You broke the rules. You brought weapons into our home.”

Erwin scoffs. 

“You signed a contract in blood,” Hanji says reasonably. “The only reason you’re not dead--” They stop talking, and tilt their head curiously . “If you were anybody else you’d be dead.”

Erwin tilts his head. If he were anybody else? 

“Why--”

“Stop looking for us, Erwin,” Hanji says gently. “Petra can’t keep you safe forever.” 

“Keep me safe?” Erwin says sharply, looking over at the spritely woman who’s now smiling at him as she bounces on the balls of her feet. 

“Do you know how many times I saved your skin at those parties you like to go to?” the woman, Petra, says cheerfully. For the first time, Erwin realizes he’s seen her once before, in a ball gown, moving through the shadows, but when he looked again she was gone. “They’d have bled you dry otherwise.”

Erwin shakes the blade at his wrist loose and holds it up. “I don’t need your protection.” And really, why are they even offering? 

Hanji chuckles. “The people you met in Levi’s house-- they’re not like the people you’ve been hunting out here. You’re daring death, Smith. I like you, I’ll be honest. You’ve got balls. But what you’re doing… whatever it is you’re after, you’re in over your head. Go home. Get some sleep.” They smile. “Maybe take a walk in the sun. You’re looking a little  _ pale _ .” 

They push off from the wall then, hands in their pockets, and stroll away. Erwin thinks about calling after them, running to stop them, but Petra is still standing there, watching him. He turns his head and looks at her, and she peers up at him curiously. 

“What did Hanji mean, you aren’t like the others?”

Petra shrugs. “We all follow the contract, for one. The people who wind up with Levi… we don’t like having to kill for our supper. It’s safer for us if no one turns up dead. The people you find out here-- like that lovely little leech sucking on that dockworker the other day-- they don’t care who they kill or how much attention it draws.  _ We,  _ however, prefer to keep a low profile.” 

She doesn’t move away from him, just peers up at him with an unassuming little smile. He can ask her more questions, he realizes. She’ll answer. 

“Why does Hanji have you following me? What do you care if I wind up dead?”

Petra considers him in silence, a strange, unreadable look in her eye. “Hanji’s not very complicated. They’re curious; they want to know how things work, what makes people do the things they do.” 

“So what?” he demands. “They want to know how far I’ll go to get back in?” Erwin narrows his eyes as he looks at her, wants to be sure she knows he speaks true when he says, “As far as I have to.”

“No, not you,” Petra says curiously, tilting her head. “Or at least not you directly. Levi.”

Erwin almost starts. “What?”

“He’s been acting strangly,” Petra tells him. “Hasn’t been himself. I’ve known him a long time, longer than you’ve been alive, and I’ve never seen him like this. Hanji must think it’s your fault.” 

“Me,” Erwin replies, a little breathless. He feels like the ground is moving under his feet, like he’s going to fall. “What did I do?”

“I have no idea,” she admits curtly. “But you got in his head, I think.”

I  _ got in  _ his  _ head?  _ Erwin thinks, half stunned into silence. 

“Stay safe,” she says then, and before Erwin can answer, she’s  _ jumped,  _ hooked her hands on the roof above their heads and is melting away into the shadows. 

Erwin goes home and tries to make everything he’s just learned fit into his head. Instead, he falls asleep at his desk. 

 

“Lord Smith?” 

Erwin jerks awake and shoves his hair out of his eyes. “Yes?” he manages groggily without turning around.

“There is a Mister Jaeger here, to see you, sir.”

“I’m indisposed,” Erwin calls. He finally twists in his desk chair and sees a servant peeking through the door to his office. 

“He says it’s quite urgent, sir. Says you will want to speak to him and insisted that I tell you he, uh,  _ has what you’re looking for. _ ”

Erwin stands. The sunlight is streaming in through a chink in the curtains. Books cover every conceivable surface and he almost knocks a stack over when he puts his hand on his desk. “Bring him here,” Erwin says, unable, for a moment, to hide the weariness in his voice. 

“Here, sir?” the servant says uncertainly, eyeing the room; Erwin hasn’t let anybody in to clean it in weeks. It smells like leather and vanilla from all the ancient books he’s been hoarding, and under that is the unmistakable scent of a desperate man who has locked himself into an airless room for days at a time.

“Yes.” The servant leaves. Erwin sweeps his hair back and tugs his waistcoat into shape. He opens the curtains as a courtesy, though the light nearly blinds him. 

The servant shows Jaeger in, and closes the door. Erwin meets his eye without speaking. 

He is young, perhaps Erwin’s age, if Erwin chanced to guess. He’s wearing well-made clothes, holding his hat between his hands. He’s an attractive man. Though he is fair, and Erwin has always prefered darker men, Jaeger is striking enough that Erwin might have spared him a second glance in another circumstance. But the way he is holding himself, the way his eyes are locked on Erwin’s face, all put Erwin on edge the moment he sees him. And it is disconcerting because truly, there is nothing overtly threatening about him.

“Erwin Smith?”

Erwin lifts his brows. “Yes.”

The man sticks out a hand. “My name is Zeke Jaeger. I have something you want.”

Erwin doesn’t like him. He has a quiet, unassuming demeanor that makes Erwin think of tamed hogs; viciously smart, affectionate to a man’s face, but incredibly dangerous if he is stupid enough to turn his back. 

Without taking his hand, Erwin asks, “And that is?”

“Information,” Jaeger answers. “May I sit?”

Erwin grudgingly clears off a chair and lets Jaeger fold into it. He is carrying a bag over his shoulder, on a long strap, and he takes it off before he sits. He’s tall and he sprawls casually, one leg thrown out and the other tucked under his chair. 

Erwin has to bite back his annoyance. “Well?” 

“I’m here about the creatures,” Jaeger tells him. Erwin had guessed as much, but it is still a shock to hear it. “You’ve been hunting them.”

“Who are you?” Erwin demands. 

“Just a man,” Jaeger answers. “Like you. Who wants to see the world safe from this… evil.” Erwin doesn’t answer. “You’ve been hunting them. And asking questions. When normal people start making as much noise as you do, my friends and I, we start to listen.” 

The hairs on the back of Erwin’s neck stand up. “Is that so? And who are your friends?”

Jaeger lifts his chin. “You’ve been researching them, ways to kill them-- we know. And two nights ago, you killed one, down by the docks.” 

Erwin sets his jaw. So they’ve been following him too? They know about the vampire from the docks; do they know about Petra?

“You hate them as much as we do.”

“What if I do?” Erwin tests. This was never his goal, not really. Self preservation, common sense, made him arm himself, with knowledge and weapons, but he’d never considered himself a  _ hunter.  _ He knows they exist, knows there are groups of people dedicated to erasing vampires from the world but he had never intended to seek one such group out. Instead, one of them has found him.

“Then we have a mission for you, Mister Smith,” Jaeger says with a disarming smile. 

“A mission,” Erwin answers. He is stoic, cold faced, but something sours in his chest. Who is this person who presumes to give Erwin Smith  _ missions?  _

“An hour’s ride past the city, there is a house,” Jaeger says calmly. Erwin feels his skin prickle again. “Inside this house are dozens of the creatures. They prey on innocent, lonely people, draw them in and…” Jaeger shivers and shakes his head. “Feed on them.” Erwin waits. Jaeger goes on. “They pose as a brothel,” he says bluntly, “Where people can pay for….” He trails off, lips thin. “I’m sure you can imagine the various… perversions that might occur in such a place.” 

Erwin thinks of Levi, thinks of his lips on Erwin’s neck, and his teeth, and his  _ hands,  _ thinks of Levi crawling into his lap and the dreams he’s had every night since, thinks of taking his own cock in his fist with Levi’s eyes the only thing he sees when he closes his, and says, “Go on.” 

“We want to destroy this place, Mister Smith. We want to wipe them all out. This place has acted as a haven for the creatures for… a very long time. We don’t want them in our city. We don’t want them to be able to call this place home.” 

Erwin can’t tell. He can’t tell if Jaeger knows he has been to the manor, or if he truly has no idea. 

“So what do you need me for?”

“You are unaffiliated, but capable,” Jaeger tells him. “We need a man inside, someone to get us through the door. We’ve had people there before, but they all met… unfortunate ends.” 

“Unaffiliated.”

“With any of the orders whose duty it is to destroy this evil. Entry to this house is strictly monitored. One must first obtain a special stone, given as a sort of invitation by one of the members of the household. Then there is a contract to be signed, and you will be searched, and any weapons you carry will be removed.

“They know we are looking for them, and they know how to spot us. We can no longer get past their wards.”

“Wards,” Erwin presses, trying to hide his own eagerness. What do they know of the wards?

“The stone acts a key,” Jaeger explains. It takes everything in Erwin’s power not to wave him along. “The house is fortified. Magically. And after a recent… incident… they were able to alter the wards to keep out anyone who has undergone our initiation rites. If we want to get in, we have to rely on an outsider.” He smiles, makes Erwin think of wild boars. “Someone like you.” 

“And what would I do, if I agreed to this?” Erwin’s heart is racing again, hands sweating, but it is not with fear. It is with rage. He has to struggle to keep his voice even, to keep from bashing in this insolent lordling’s skull for suggesting Erwin could ever raise a hand against Levi. 

“We need to break the wards,” Jaeger says. “The house is too heavily guarded otherwise. It’s protected from fire, from magic, from… everything we have access to. At first, you would just observe. But your ultimate goal would be to retrieve the master key.”

Erwin crosses his arms over his chest. 

“The wards in place, we are reasonably certain they are all tied to a single keystone of some sort. If you can retrieve that, we can use it to break the wards and wipe them out.”

“And how would I do that?” Erwin presses. “What is this stone? Do you know what it looks like?”

Jaeger shifts in his seat, but the motion is miniscule. Erwin knows another man might have missed it. When Jaeger begins to speak again, his voice is unchanged. “We believe the stone is in possession of the creature who cast the wards.”

“And who is that?” Erwin asks, voice low in the book-muffled room.

“‘What’ is a more apt question, Lord Smith. Currently, it goes by the name of Levi Ackerman.”

“Currently?” 

“It’s surname has varied over the years,” Jaeger answers breezily. “It appears to adopt different surnames depending on the time period and location it has chosen to settle.” Jaeger’s eyes go hard as he stares at Erwin. “It is incredibly dangerous. We believe you are capable of retrieving the stone. But we want you to understand the danger. We would hate for you to do something...” Jaeger smiles again. “Reckless.”

Erwin’s mouth feels dry. His face is stone, it always is, but inside, he is furious. “What’s so dangerous about him?” he asks. 

“The creature Levi Ackerman is… it’s a monster, Mister Smith. It is the oldest of its kind that we have ever come across. We have been unable to pinpoint it’s exact age, but it is mentioned in some of our oldest texts.

“Tell me everything you know about him--it,” Erwin says. Then he adds reasonably, though it turns his stomach to do so, “If I’m to face this...creature. I should know what you know.” 

“Much of this is speculation, sir. But we believe in life, it was a fighter, or a slave-- a gladiator, of some sort. But also a witch.”

“A witch,” Erwin scoffs incredulously. He knows now that there is true magic in the world. But the word ‘witch’ evokes ridiculous images-- naked women dancing with devils, black cats and bubbling cauldrons. Levi, a witch?

“The stories we have of  Levi Ackerman the man-- they begin with an ancient record of his arrest, along with several others. The others were executed-- burned-- for witchcraft. But not Ackerman. The details are unclear, but it seems he… disappeared before his date of execution. We lose track of him, after that, for several centuries. But when he appears in our records again, we are reasonably certain it is the same man. We believe the original records date to nearly three thousand years ago.”

Erwins head swims. He thinks of Levi’s quicksilver eyes, thinks of how fathomless they are, how they make Erwin feel small.  _ Three thousand years?  _

“Our texts-- mostly journals from men who hunt the creatures-- follow Ackerman through the years and it leaves a trail of destruction in its wake. Everywhere it goes, chaos and bloodshed and death follow.”

“And you want me to steal a stone from this man?” Erwin asks. “How?”

“It is not a man, Mister Smith. We want you to get close to the creatures,” Jaeger explains. “If you have the chance to take Ackerman out, take it. But we are more concerned with getting the stone. However you choose to do that is up to you.” 

“And how would you get me in?” This is the question he has been waiting to ask, the one he has been careful not to demand too soon.

“We will put you in contact with a creature who can supply you with a stone. You will have to earn the creature’s trust first, but we believe it has been looking for someone new to take… uh… home.” 

Erwin’s heart sinks. None of them will give him a sigil stone-- they all know, somehow, who he is, how to spot him. And he won’t kill one of Levi’s people just to steal a stone. Even if he did get in, Hanji would stop him at the door.

“No,” Erwin says.

“Excuse me.” Jaeger’s barely flinches, and his voice is mild, but Erwin knows he has still caught Jaeger off guard.

“You’ve got information but no plan,” Erwin tells him. “And I won’t fall on that sword for you. Get out of my house.” 

“Mister Smith, please--”

“I said ‘no,” Erwin says coldly, raising his voice over Jaeger’s protests. “I won’t do it. Find someone else.” 

Jaeger shakes his head and stands, taking his hat and his bag in hand. “That is very unfortunate Mister Smith. We are prepared to offer you--”

“I don’t need your money,” Erwin interrupts. “And I can do my own research. Good day.”

“And good day to you, Mister Smith,” Jaeger replies. “I hope you enjoy it.” 

He sees himself out and Erwin has to force himself not to think of the gently spoken courtesy as a threat.

 

Erwin awakes, hours later, and knows something is not right. The house is too quiet. The clock reads just past midnight, but Erwin’s servants have taken to living like their master-- sleeping until mid morning, not retiring until well past midnight. They should still be awake.

Erwin climbs out of bed and pads, utterly silent, into the hallway. He knows exactly where to step so he makes no sound; he takes his sword from its place by the door as he passes. After his meeting with Zeke Jaeger, he had bathed, combed his hair, changed into a nightshirt. It has been weeks since he hasn’t slept at his desk, wearing whatever it is he wore that day, and the simple act of changing into sleep clothes when he had been so exhausted had felt almost like luxury. Now, he regrets everything. 

He reaches the stairs without seeing anyone, and he pulls his nightshirt up past his knees and keeps it bunched in his fist as he walks; he needs to take wide, careful steps in order to move down the stairs and still keep his sword at the ready. He makes it down the first flight, and the second, without incident. When he reaches the bottom of the third flight, he spots his butler lying on the floor in the entrance hallway. His hand is outstretched, a candle still guttering where it has fallen. Erwin opens his mouth to hiss the man’s name until he sees the candle flame reflected in his open eyes, and a spreading pool of blood. He tightens his grip on the sword, and looks around. 

He almost doesn’t see them at first. But as he stares into the flickering shadows, the darkness resolves into shapes, all around the edges of the room. Men in black, carrying daggers. They are everywhere, all along the walls, and Erwin feels icy fear freeze his heart when he realizes they are on the third floor too; he had walked right past them. They surround him. 

“Worried about your odds?” he demands of no one in particular. He is thinking of the way Jaeger had said,  _ I hope you enjoy it,  _ when they move, all at once. 

Erwin runs the first one through and is satisfied that they are human when he screams and bleeds and falls. He swings his sword, feels it bite and drag on flesh, and shrinks into himself, every ounce of his awareness focused on the air whistling around his bade and his ears, on the sound of quiet breaths, on the brush of a hand against his cursed night shirt. He sees, from this vantage, more of his servants with their throats slit, fallen in open doorways, or splayed on the floor where he couldn’t see them until this exact moment. He sees them, but it is not until well after his eyes have moved on that he recognizes what he has seen. He is too focused on fighting, on  _ living,  _ on cursing Jaeger and his  _ order.  _ Of course, Erwin had been a fool to deny him. Of course he would have never let Erwin live with all the information he’d so freely given. 

Of course, if Erwin had been sleeping lately, he would have realized, but exhaustion made him slow.

He fights. He murders. 

But there are just so many of them. 

His arms start to feel heavy. He has punched them away from him, bruised his left hand on their faces while he runs them through with the sword in his right. One of them grabs his elbow, starts trying to pull him down. He hurls himself backward, kicks off on the person in front of him and creates space, but he can’t shake the one who has grabbed him. His right arm is hindered; he takes his sword into his left and slashes someone across the chest.

His front door bangs open, loud and harsh, and Erwin uses the distraction to adjust his grip on his sword so he can stab the man behind him. 

There is a curse. It’s not in any language Erwin recognizes, but he can tell by the low, grating quality of the word, by the vehemence with which it’s spoken, that it is very foul.  

Erwin does turn then, because while he had never expected to wake up to an army of assassins in his house, he had expected even less to hear that voice in his doorway. One of them jumps on his back. He barely notices. 

Levi.

He is disheveled and dusty, with his hair in his eyes and his hands curled into fists.  “Erwin.” (Even now, like this, hearing Levi say his name almost brings him to his knees.) “You have to invite me in, you have to say my name.” His voice is quiet, low, but it travels well, so Erwin almost feels like he’s heard the words spoken directly into his head rather than with his ears. Levi sounds calm, collected. He’s not even breathless. But somehow, Erwin can hear a simmering fury coloring all his consonants, accenting them strangely so Erwin realizes for the first time that Levi’s speech, for all it’s rough qualities, has always been just a hair too careful. 

Erwin is distracted. Someone cuts his arm, a long gash from bicep to elbow. Erwin jerks away before he adjusts and punches at the attacker. The man ducks; Erwin’s fist connects with the molding around a door frame and red pain bursts in his knuckles. The person scrambling at his back tries to swing their blade down over his shoulder so he hurls himself backward, crushes them against the railing. 

“Oh, you want in do you, need to be  _ invited?”  _ he grunts.

“This is no time for irony, you fucking idiot, let me in before they kill you.”

“Really?” Erwin calls, wheezing as he impales someone on his sword again. It feels strange in his left hand, a bit slower than normal. He flings it up to block a dagger blow and barely gets his own blade in front of his chest in time. “Do you think I need your help?” 

Levi curses again, in that strange language that almost sounds like latin but like no latin Erwin’s ever heard before. 

“Come in!” he grunts loudly. They’re piling on him now, and there’s just  _ so many-- _

_ “My name, say my name.” _

_ “Levi Ackerman,”  _ he bellows. He feels what the name does to every man in the room, feels the way even the ones trying to slit his throat pause and look toward the door. “ _ I invite you into my home.”  _

He hears Levi laugh once, a cold, murderous sound. And then the screaming starts. 

Erwin had been holding his own. He’d killed a handful, injured a few more. But it is nothing,  _ nothing,  _ compared to what he watches now. The men attacking him scatter, try to regroup, as Levi tears through the ones who had been crawling all over the first floor. Erwin can’t even see him, most of the time. He sees only a shadow, and wherever it appears, sprays of blood soon follow. The assassins start to fall. Then they try to run, first out the front door, and then up the stairs. Erwin chases after the ones that try to climb higher, manages to spear a few through the back before a light wind touches his arm, leaves a smear of blood and a delicious chill behind, and the ones who had made it to the third floor crumble. There had been a few left on that floor, and Levi makes short work of them. 

All at once, the house is quiet. Erwin lifts his eyes and finds Levi surveying the scene, one stolen dagger in each hand, dripping blood onto Erwin’s wooden floors. 

Erwin feels like someone has cut his heart out of his chest and put it in Levi’s hands. He feels like he has been living in the dark and woken up to moonlight for the first time in his life. He feels like he is staring at a god. 

Levi turns and looks at him, and drops the daggers on the floor. 

Erwin’s standing alone at the bottom of the stairs, and relief washes over him. Levi killed all of them. In  _ seconds.  _

He falls to one knee before he realizes why, before every cut and bruise and scrape he’d gotten pulses all at once, and in the second before his knee connects with the wooden floor, Levi is at his side, his hand on Erwin’s shoulder. 

“ _ Cunts.” _ Erwin is startled by the venom in Levi’s voice. From the way his eyes tighten at the corners, he guesses Levi is too.

Erwin pushes himself back up, the dizziness passed. “I’m fine. It’s just. Just scratches.” He drops his own sword; it feels  _ so  _ heavy. “Are you…” Levi is so covered in blood, Erwin can’t tell if any of it belongs to him. 

“‘M fine.” He slips one hand under Erwin’s elbow, and Erwin lets himself be led back up the stairs, where there is less blood. The scent of it is making his stomach turn.

“Why are you here?” He’s trying not to stare at Levi and failing. He’d been utterly terrified he was never going to see Levi again; and now Levi is in his  _ house.  _ With his hands on Erwin’s arm, leading him to safety. It doesn’t make sense. Erwin blinks. It  _ really  _ doesn’t make sense.

“That’s no way to thank me.”

“How did you know?”

“Petra,” Levi answers. “Saw ‘em coming, didn’t think she could take ‘em all herself.” 

_ All of them.  _ Erwin stares at Levi in sheer, uncontained amazement. He’d killed  _ all  _ of them.

“So you came alone?”

Levi scoffs. Erwin understands; of course he did.

He leads Erwin back to his own room, and sits Erwin on the edge of his bed. Erwin lets him. Levi is touching him and he never wants him to stop. 

He does jerk away when Levi pushes up the sleeve of his nightshirt and examines the gash on his arm. His hands are cold, but so gentle. After a moment, he says, “We should stitch this.”

He is focused on Erwin’s arm, staring at it  _ so intently  _ and Erwin has the feeling he is avoiding Erwin’s face. 

“Levi.” The name feels like a curse on his lips, like a deliciously dirty word spoken only in quiet, dark places, like Erwin is sinning just by speaking it.

He looks up then, and Erwin tries to count the centuries in his eyes. Three thousand year old eyes. It is time beyond comprehension.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Levi mutters, dropping Erwin’s arm. 

“How old are you?”

“That’s rude,” Levi replies, deadpan. “How old are you?”

Erwin laughs. He feels stronger now, less like he can’t stand on his own two feet, and he pushes off the bed so he can wipe some of the blood from his skin. Levi lets him stand, gives him space. 

He still says, “Why the fuck did I just gut half an army of Marleyians in your foyer?”

“Marleyians?” Erwin says in some surprise. He’s never heard the name before in his life. 

“Did you get hit on the head during that fight or are you always this slow?”

Erwin wipes the blood from his face. “A man came to see me today, a Zeke Jaeger.” 

Levi curses, in a new language this time. Erwin wants to guess it’s Greek but it’s so… different, somehow.

“So you know him?”

“I’ve heard of him. What did he want?”

“Wanted me to steal from you. Some kind of… master key for the wards around your house.” Levi stares at Erwin, holding himself perfectly still. “I told him ‘no.’” 

“Why?” 

Erwin just lifts his brows. It is Levi’s turn to look away. 

“Why did you come?” Erwin asks him quietly. 

“Fucking deaf? I just told you, Petra--”

“No,” Erwin interrupts. “Why did  _ you  _ come?” 

Levi stares at him. Erwin stares back. Levi’s eyes fall when he sniffs and shrugs and says, “Wasn’t doing anything else.” 

But Erwin knows better. Erwin heard him at the doorway,  _ begging  _ to be let in, hissing Erwin’s name in a panic. It had been panic. Erwin’s not sure how he knows, since Levi’s voice had been so smooth and soft and controlled. But Erwin knows. Levi had been  _ angry.  _ And until Erwin invited him inside, he’d been scared.

Erwin peels off his nightshirt as he disappears behind his bathing screen; he uses his cold, dirty bathwater and the night shirt itself to quickly wipe some of the blood from his body before he pulls on the nearest pair of trousers he can lay hands on. His hands hurt. When he steps out from behind the screen again, rag draped over his throbbing right hand and water pitcher in the other, Levi has his back turned and Erwin almost laughs. His modesty was the last thing he’d been thinking of. 

He could hand Levi the pitcher and the rag. Instead, he sets the pitcher down, puts his hand on Levi’s shoulder, and feels his own pulse in his fingertips when Levi doesn’t shrug him away. He feels it rushing in his ears when he, as casually as he can, dips his rag into the pitcher, and bends forward. Levi lets Erwin clean the blood from his face, and Erwin is sick with it, with the closeness, with every question he has, with all his rage and all his longing. He is shocked into stillness when Levi, with an annoyed sigh, puts his fingers on Erwin’s chin and tilts his head back to peer at the livid white scars on Erwin’s neck.

“I. Didn’t mean to do that.”

Erwin blinks down at him. 

“It seemed like you did.” 

“Not. Like that.” When Erwin just furrows his brows, Levi frowns and then looks away again, almost petulant. 

“I want you to undo it,” Erwin tells him. 

“Undo it?” Levi says in what Erwin thinks might be surprise; it’s hard to tell with Levi. “I can’t change time,” he drawls 

“Not the scars,” Erwin says. “The… the…” The what? What word does he have for it?  _ Infatuation. _ “Compulsion.” 

“Compulsion.” Levi says, bemused. 

Erwin is still wiping the blood from his face. He never wants to stop. “The dreams,” he mutters. “I want it to stop. I know what you did, I’ve read about being enthralled--”

“Enthralled?” Levi’s voice is just a touch sharp, and he draws away. “You think I--” He barks in cold, disbelieving laughter. “Thralls are braindead,” he says. “Only take orders, can’t barely breathe without being told-- you know how a thrall is made?” Erwin shakes his head. “Blood. They have to drink it. Mine,” he clarifies. 

Erwin starts to shake his head. Levi has enchanted him. That’s it, that’s the only explanation, it’s the only thing that  _ makes sense.  _

“You thought I-- why would you think that-- what dreams?” he finishes, voice falling into a deep whisper on the last phrase that makes Erwin’s toes curl against his wood floor. The things he’s heard that voice whisper in his dreams-- never quite right, never exactly Levi, but close enough that he can hear them now, can’t stop hearing them.

Erwin’s cheeks feel hot. His chest feels hot. He can’t think about this now, he can’t consider that he knows,  _ he knows,  _ Levi isn’t lying to him, so instead he steps forward again to keep wiping Levi’s face, but Levi draws back. This time, his motion is sharp, unplanned, and he hisses in pain before he clutches at his side. 

And Erwin feels nothing but concern. He lays one hand on Levi’s shoulder, and reaches, tentatively, for Levi’s shirt. “It’s nothing, I’m fine,” Levi grits out. But he doesn’t shrug out of Erwin’s touch, and he doesn’t draw away when Erwin bunches the fabric in his hand. 

It’s so red and sticky with blood, Erwin almost doesn’t realize it’s torn. It’s not until he feels it snag, and feels Levi twitch that he sees the jagged hole in the fabric, and in the center of it, a sharp splinter. 

He doesn’t ask for permission as he carefully draws the fabric over the wood, and then higher, over Levi’s head. His skin is smooth, sticky with a pink film of blood, and layered over muscle that looks like it’s cut from marble. Erwin has never seen a man who looks like this. There is something deliciously low class about it. Hard labor builds a body like this and little else. He has to struggle not to touch Levi’s chest, to focus on the ragged gash and the wood impaling Levi’s side. 

It looks bad. It’s bleeding sluggishly, the edges uneven, and the piece of wood is buried so deeply, it’s almost hard to see. He hears Levi’s teeth slide, and then he says, “Well, shit.” 

“You need to sit down,” Erwin says harshly. How is he even still standing?

“Pull it out.” 

“ _ What?  _ I can’t just-- it’ll scar, you’ll get an infection--” 

Levi rolls his eyes. “Of course. Big  _ and  _ stupid. Just pull it out, you gorilla.” 

Erwin furrows his brows. “Are you… are you sure?”

“I’m pretty fucking sure.” 

Erwin takes a deep breath to steady himself, and puts his hand back on Levi’s shoulder. He hears Levi’s teeth slide again when he grips the splinter (very carefully between his thumb and forefinger. The other fingers on his right hand don’t seem to want to work). He only hesitates for a moment before he yanks. 

Levi curls forward, grunts, hisses, and then curses. He hits himself on the hip with the hand not clutching at Erwin’s shoulder for support, and then he straightens up. “Sonovabitch.”

Erwin watches a wave of blood bubble, sick and thick, from the wound, and then Levi’s skin knits back together. When he lifts his eyes to Levi’s face again, Levi is breathing lightly. “I’m hard to kill,” he says softly. 

“That’s good,” Erwin hears himself reply. 

The wound doesn’t fully close. There is still a space in the middle that looks deep and open and painful. Erwin waits for it to close and when it doesn’t, Levi curses again. 

“What?”

“It must have been blessed,” he mutters, pulling at the edges of the wound. “And there’s still a piece left.”

“So. What should I...”

“Hanji can get the rest out. And I’ll need to eat,” he adds under his breath. He looks up.

There is silence. Levi is looking Erwin in the eye, and for a moment, Erwin forgets everything. He forgets that all his servants are dead. He forgets that there is an army of dead men in his hallways, and that his home looks like a battlefield. He forgets who he is. He almost holds his arm out, wrist up. Or lifts his chin. An offering.

“Your hand.” Levi breaks the silence. 

Erwin follows his gaze to Erwin’s right hand, hanging limping at his side and dripping blood from the slash across his forearm. He holds it up and examines it for the first time. He feels sick when he looks at it. The ridges of his knuckles are all misshapen, in the wrong spots.

“Give me that.” 

Erwin’s instincts tear him in two directions. The pain radiating from his fist makes him want to hold his hand close to his body, keep it away from further harm. But, though he knows it doesn’t make any sense all things considered, another part of him is sure Levi would never hurt him. 

He hesitantly holds out his hand. 

Levi takes hold, his fingers strong and sure and rough and though he is very gentle, Erwin still winces. 

“He didn’t get up, did he?” Levi asks wryly. 

“What?” 

“The man you hit. You must have hit him hard.” 

“Uh,” Erwin grimaces and chuckles at himself. “He ducked. I hit the door frame.” 

Levi’s nose wrinkles sympathetically. Erwin smiles at him. Levi smiles back. 

There is a jerk and a crunch and Erwin doubles over, a choked shout forcing itself from his lips. The pain is mostly gone almost as quickly as it came, but Erwin still feels dizzy with the memory of the bones in his hand sliding against one another. He had torn his hand from Levi’s strong fingers and he holds it protectively to his chest now.

Levi pats him once on the shoulder while he pants for breath. When he chances to look back down at his knuckles he finds they are all in the proper places again. 

It is a long moment before he can stand up straight. But by the time he does, the pain in both hands is a dull throbbing ache that is vastly preferable to the way the right had been pulsing and burning before. He meets Levi’s eye and still doesn’t know whether to thank him or curse him. 

“Warn me next time,” he says almost petulantly instead. 

The corner of Levi’s mouth twitches once.  “Get dressed. You can stay with us until…” He trails off, and Erwin understands. Until when? Until he doesn’t have a secret order of vampire hunters trying to murder him? Until Levi figures out what to do with him?

And then he realizes he’s been standing in front of Levi shirtless and Levi has, all at once, become  _ very  _ interested in Erwin’s face, when before, he almost couldn’t look at it. 

“Why?” he asks. 

“Always the ‘why’ with you,” Levi groans, throwing his head back. “Don’t you ever just say ‘thank you?’”

“Thank you,” Erwin answers. 

Levi finally chuckles. 

 

They clean up as best they can. Erwin gives Levi a shirt to wear and it looks ridiculous, tucked into his bloody trousers. It is far too big for him. He tells Erwin not to bother with packing, unless there is something he can’t bare to leave behind. Erwin stuffs a few books into a bag, and they walk outside. 

“Where’s your horse?” he asks, turning to Levi when he doesn’t spot one on the street. 

“I don’t have one,” Levi scoffs. “I ran.” 

“You  _ ran?”  _

“Yes, I  _ ran.  _ It’s faster.” Erwin gapes at him. “Let’s go.”

Erwin saddles his horse, still trying to wrap his head around the idea of Levi  _ running  _ all the way here, and is sitting in the saddle before he realizes he’s only saddled one horse and Levi hasn’t moved toward another. He twists in his seat to look down, and before he can say anything, Levi is hoisting himself over the back of Erwin’s mare and settling his cold, hard chest against Erwin’s back. Erwin’s heart beats so fast he thinks Levi can  _ feel  _ it. 

“Go on.”

With a monumental effort, Erwin kicks his horse into a gallop and the two of them disappear into the night.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HEY GUESS WHAT THIS FIC ISN'T DEAD I SWEAR 
> 
> <3

He is physically exhausted when they arrive. He is light headed from so many cuts, his left hand is throbbing around the reins, and the deathly still feeling of Levi behind him is disconcerting, distracting, delirious, and devastating. Erwin can’t feel him breathing. He doesn’t shift in the saddle. He doesn’t speak. Erwin starts to wonder if he’s really there, if Erwin hasn’t imagined the whole damn thing in another of his ridiculous dreams. But when he turns his head, he can see the shadow of Levis head, his rough cut hair splaying away form his face in the wind. 

He practically falls off his horse when they stop, catches himself at the last minute and manages just to totter for a moment as Levi swings down and stalks toward the manor. Erwin climbs wearily from the saddle and realizes he has no idea what to do with his horse. 

“You look like shit.” Erwin doesn’t turn when he hears Hanji speak from the doorway. 

“Shut it, four eyes,” Levi snaps. Erwin finally looks over his shoulder and sees Hanji and a little cluster of people watching from the doorway. Levi starts to push through them (or keeps walking forward while they all make room) but then he stops and turns. Erwin sees him dig in his pocket and then he tosses something into the air that Erwin just manages to catch. 

It is his coin-- Erwin’s coin-- the one Hanji had taken from him. He almost sags in relief with it in his hand again and the feeling of the carved runes and the angel wings under his thumb is soothing. 

“I’ll take care of this beauty.”

Erwin lifts his head when a sweet, familiar voice sounds from the path. Petra is smiling at him and she reaches out for his horse’s reins.

“Glad to see you’re still standing.” 

“Thank you,” Erwin tells her. 

She shrugs, winks. “You can owe me one.” And then she’s leading the horse away and there is nothing but for Erwin to follow Levi inside. 

He hesitates on the threshold, terribly afraid that if he tries to step through, he’ll be thrown back again, hurled through the air like so much garbage. He’s not sure his body can take it. 

Levi is at the end of the hall, Hanji’s hands on his skin, and it is the sight of Hanji lifting Levi’s shirt to peer at the hole in his side that makes Erwin take the final step into the building. There is no flash of light. He doesn’t go flying through the air. He is safe. 

“He needs a room,” he hears Levi mutter. 

“A _room?”_ Hanji demands, voice far louder than Levi’s. Everyone in the hallway turns and looks at them, then looks at Erwin with shocked expressions on their faces. Except for one of them-- the tall, athletic woman he’d met before is staring at him with uncomfortable interest and Erwin is instantly unnerved. He remembers he is still covered in blood, some old, some new, oozing from clotting wounds. 

“Did I stutter?”

“I… alright. Ymir.”

The tall woman jumps. “Huh?”

“Get the man a room,” Hanji demands, motioning toward Erwin. Hanji pauses and stares at him for a moment, then adds, “Third floor.” 

“On it,” Ymir drawls. She doesn’t move though. Not until the pretty blonde who’d bitten Erwin on the wrist takes her by the elbow and says sweetly, “I’ll help.” After that, Ymir moves _very_ quickly. 

Erwin hovers by the door as Levi strips his shirt off and balls it into his fist. Hanji’s hands are on him again, and Erwin feels an odd, vicious surge of hatred. Everyone is _staring_ at him and Erwin wants to shield him from view. 

Hanji whistles. “That is one nasty gash.”

Levi presses his chin to his ( _naked, powerful, truly devastating)_ chest and says, “‘S fine. He needs stitches.” 

Before Erwin can protest that his wounds aren’t pressing at all, Hanji appears at his side and starts tugging at his clothes. 

“Should do it up there,” Levi mutters. “Where they can’t smell him,” he adds, sending a severe look to the little cluster of onlookers. A few of them start guiltily. A few more quietly slip away. “Fucking vultures.”

“Fine. But he needs to clean up first,” Hanji says to Levi, as if Erwin isn’t standing right there. “You’re both filthy.

Levi pulls a face. It’s the most emotion Erwin has ever seen him put into one single expression before, and he’s utterly disgusted. Erwin chuckles, a rush of fondness swelling in his chest, and doesn’t try to hide it when Levi and Hanji both look at him suspiciously. 

Hanji leads them both outside, and Erwin has to avoid the eyes that seem to watch them from every doorway as Hanji takes them through the house and out the backdoor. There are people outside, taking in the moonlight, lounging on crumbling stone benches in the dying garden. Erwin catches sight of a stable with horses-- and Petra brushing down his mare-- before Hanji leads them into a relatively secluded little alcove. It’s fenced in on three sides by dead hedges overgrown with ivy, and nestled against the shortest length of hedge is a metal and wood contraption that Erwin has to stare at curiously before it begins to make any sense. When it does, he smiles. Someone has rigged the water pump to spurt from a spout above their heads; there is a raised wooden platform to keep their toes out of the mud and to let the dirty water drain, and there’s even a stone bench to sit on under the stream, and one more at the open end of the little alcove. Hanji sits there; Levi plops down on the bench under the water spout and starts pulling off his shoes. 

“Mother fucking _Marlyains,”_ he says without preamble, looking at Hanji. “A whole shitload of ‘em.”

“How many is a shitload?”

Levi shrugs one shoulder. “Fuck, I dunno, thirty? Erwin?”

Erwin jumps at the sound of his name. He’s been standing at the entrance to the alcove, watching Levi take off his bloody boots and stockings. He has very small, very white feet. Erwin wonders how small they would look in his hands, if he could hide one in his palms. His cheeks feel hot when he realizes they are looking at him. 

“I didn’t count,” he answers honestly. 

“They’d killed his whole staff by the time I got there,” Levi grumbles. He’s taking off his pants now. Erwin shouldn’t stare. “He was the only one left.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry--” Hanji begins, giving Erwin a passably sincere look. Erwin almost doesn’t hear them-- he’s too busy speaking.

“How do you know?” he asks curiously, looking back at Levi in spite of his explicit instructions to himself to look at a spot in the hedges where a single moonflower has managed to find purchase. 

Levi sighs, as if explaining to Erwin how he knows such a thing will be far more trouble than it’s worth. 

Hanji tilts their head back against a hedge and says, as Levi folds his pants and throws them away from him, “When you’ve been around as long as we have, you pick up a few tricks.”

Levi snorts, and Erwin looks at him without thinking. He has his back to them; he pumps the water on and it starts to cascade from the spout, drenching him. The blood runs from his skin in red then pink rivulets, sticking in all the places his body curves and Erwin is completely captivated by the shape of him, by the _strong_ muscles in his shoulders and his impossibly thin waist and the little divot above his backside where the soft dark hair on his body is just a little thicker, and his _utterly perfect, wonderfully round--_

“Erwin.”

“Hmm?”

Hanji is smirking at him; Erwin can’t see their eyes behind their glasses from the way the glass catches the light of the moon.

Levi doesn’t turn around. Erwin is aware ( _irrevocably aware, how could he not be)_ of Levi’s hands coming up and scrubbing through his short hair. He has soap.

“I said ‘we can sense life.’”

Erwin blinks. That is _very_ interesting. It is still very hard to drag his attention away from Levi. 

“Sense. Life?”

“Yes,” Hanji explains. “We can see and hear and smell better than… normal people. But all that gets stronger the longer we’re… here. Levi would have heard if anyone was still alive. Heartbeats, breathing. That sort of thing. And even a freshly dead body smells… different than a living one.”

“Oh,” Erwin answers. Levi is naked and for the first time in his life Erwin can’t think of any questions to ask. Hanji’s grin gets sharper 

“Awful lot of people to send for one man,” they finally comment. 

“Killed at least five by the time I got there,” Levi answers. “Shoulda sent more.”

“Oh, five, scary,” Hanji drawls cheerfully. 

Erwin scowls at them. 

The water stops falling. Erwin looks at Hanji even more closely as he listens to Levi rustling around behind them. Hanji’s eyes gleam.

“You next.” Levi’s velvet voice sounds at Erwin’s side and his heart nearly stops. Levi moves so quickly, so quietly. When Erwin looks down at him, he has a long towel tied around his waist, his wet hair hanging in his eyes, and little droplets of water clinging to his chin. Erwin watches the water beading from his hair as it stretches, breaks, and falls, leaves a long wet trail over the cusp of his cheek, puddles in the corner of his mouth, disappears around the marble of his jaw. 

Erwin swallows. 

Everything looks washed out in the moonlight. The world around Erwin is gray and shallow, full of empty shadows. 

Levi gleams and Erwin can’t stand it. He can’t stand the liquid glimmer on his skin, the way he glitters like light reflected off polished wet stone. He can’t stand the impossible silk of Levi’s hair, _knows_ how soft and how dark it would feel even though he’s never touched it. He can’t stand Levi’s eyes. Those are the worst of all. Eyes like ocean water during a storm. Eyes so flat it makes Erwin feel like he’s cracking down the middle just looking at him, and it’s worse when they catch the light. Erwin has only seen it a few times. Levi’s eyes are incomprehensible, empty, vast like a dessert, flat and fathomless. But every so often, Erwin has seen him blink, has seen something like surprise flit across his face and in those infinitesimal moments he looks human and Erwin shatters. Erwin can’t even stand the sound of Levi’s name and how much he wants to say it.

“Erwin.”

Levi’s _voice._ A man’s voice has never affected him like this. The way he says Erwin’s name, the way he--

“ _Erwin.”_

Erwin tries to open his mouth and finds, strangely, that he can’t. 

“Levi.” It’s Hanji. They sound startled but Erwin can’t think why. 

Levi reaches out and touches him, and Erwin doesn’t care about Hanji at all. His brain struggles to catch up, to understand why Levi is suddenly tugging at his shirt like he’s desperate to pull it off. If Erwin could move, he’d help him. 

The shirt catches, snags on dried blood. Levi tears it away, and Erwin feels as if Levi has gouged him open. _Pain_ like white fire, unimaginable, consuming, blinds him, cocoons him, sucks him in so effectively he is sure he will never feel anything good ever again. Levi curses in that strange, beautiful language of his, and Erwin tries to remember what the word had sounded like when it is gone. But he doesn’t remember anything. 

*

Everything hurts. He is deaf and blind. His tongue sticks stiff behind his teeth. Pain is a flat reality, unbending, swaddling him like stone, like a crypt. He will never be free of it. He will never see light again.

*

Erwin’s skin sticks to unfamiliar sheets. He is sweltering, even as his fingers and toes freeze. The sheets dig into his skin, courser than his own and rubbing him raw until he twists to find comfort. A wave of aroma hits him-- the stench of illness, of his own desperte sweat, and something else. Something like night air and rust and flowers.

_Levi._

His brain supplies the name before it has woken enough for him to fully realize such a person exists; with the name comes full consciousness, and also a red hot pulse behind his closed eyelids. It wipes him out, robs him of thought, and he groans feebly, before he can stop himself, hand floating up to squeeze over his eyes. He uses his left hand-- his right feels like one stiff, unrelenting bruise. The headache ebbs, just enough that he can finally try to open his eyes again.

It’s dark, and Erwin stares into the shadows for a long time before he can see. 

He is in the attic. He can see from the shape of the room that it spans the entire length of the manor; there are two small, round windows at either end of the room, and the ceiling touches the floor in places, with the slope of the roof. The windows are closed and shuttered, but one of the shutters is missing a slat and Erwin can see thick ivy and pinpricks of sunlight filtering through. Erwin is laying in the bed, sheets bunched haphazardly around him. If he sits up too quickly, he will bump his head on the low, slanted ceiling. 

The floor is scrubbed clean. Under the window with the broken shutter, there is a bench, and beside it, a low, wide bookshelf. Erwin’s eyes snag on the books--even from here, he can tell some of them are positively ancient. There is a round table with two chairs, and a half burnt candle in the center of it. On the other side of the room, beneath the unbroken window, is another table and collection of shelves, these holding a strange assortment of dried herbs and crystals and other odds and ends Erwin can barely identify. 

And that is where he sees Levi, glowing in the dim light, head bent over a book that Erwin is sure he can’t see. Erwin watches him lift a hand to turn a page, and the he falls utterly still again, so still he might have been carved from stone if Erwin hadn’t just watched him move. 

Erwin realizes he is in Levi’s room.

The whole thing is trim and bare, nearly empty of any personal effects. Erwin peers around and has the overwhelming sense that all of this has been here for a very, very long time, and yet, it almost looks as if Levi had moved his things in barely a week ago. 

Erwin can’t bring himself to speak. Levi is _so beautiful,_ just watching is a comfort.

He doesn’t have to say anything; Levi lifts his head all at once, peers across the dark room and sees Erwin looking at him and before Erwin can blink Levi is by his side, smoothing some of the wrinkles from the sheets and saying in a low, soft voice, “Don’t move.”

Erwin lets himself be commanded, even though he’d been about to shift again, to try to find some way to drape his long arms and legs that doesn’t burn. 

Levi’s eyes flow over him and Erwin hates that he cannot guess what Levi is thinking, when he is usually so good at knowing the secrets hiding in men’s hearts. Levi’s hand comes up, twitches in the sheets, pulling it lower, around Erwin’s waist, and Erwin realizes he is naked but for a pair of drawers that couldn’t have been his since he wasn’t wearing any when he left his home. 

He’s been bandaged; Levi’s fingers flutter against his skin, blessedly cool, and Erwin relaxes with a groan. It’s an embarrassing sound, low and intimate, and he looks at Levi immediately, half hating himself for making it, but Levi only continues with his work, the ghost of a smile on his lips. Erwin isn’t sure what he’s doing but his hands bring relief wherever they touch. Erwin wants to arch into them, catlike, and languish in the silk of his skin. 

“Can you touch the ceiling,” Levi asks, voice held neutral, careful. 

Erwin lifts both hands above his head; they rise, but it is a struggle. The fingers of his left hand brush the rough wood, but he can’t make his right reach and he lets them both fall back, panting with the effort. 

“What happened?” he groans finally. The words scrape him raw on their way out; he is _so_ thirsty.

“Poison,” Levi answers. He is carefully checking all Erwin’s bandages now. Occasionally, he presses into Erwin’s skin with the tips of his fingers to see how Erwin reacts. “Belladona. Nightshade. Mainly. The cut on your arm. Probably it was on the blade.”

Erwin hisses when Levi touches him. 

“Hurts?” Levi asks, lessening the pressure, adjusting his fingertips. 

“No,” Erwin admits. “Feels good.”

That ghost of a smile flickers over Levi’s lips again. “Cold?”

Erwin mumbles in the affirmative. His heart is racing. He feels as if he has spent too much time in the sun, as if everything is too hot and too bright. His limbs are so sluggish he feels as if they are weighing him down. 

Levi’s eyes are on Erwin’s skin again. His hair is bone dry, falling over his forehead and his plain clothes are so dated, Erwin almost feels strange looking at him, like he’s staring at a ghost. As Erwin watches, a tiny shadow of uncertainty crosses in front of his eyes. His fingers hesitate as they release the last folds of the bandage he’d been checking. Then the uncertainty passes, and he splays his small palm over Erwin’s chest, just above the place where his heart beats. Erwin feels Levi’s thumb and forefinger straddling the hollow of his throat, feels soothed to the soles of his feet and he breathes out through his nose in one long, relieved sigh. 

Levi looks away, stares at a spot on the wall above Erwin’s head with his face a porcelain mask, as if he cannot bear to think himself capable of such a kindness.

Erwin hurts. His skin hurts and his throat hurts and his arm _hurts_. But the place Levi touches does not, and Erwin is so thankful for it, he can’t help but press his luck. With a monumental effort, he lifts his left arm and sets the tips of his fingers against Levi’s knuckles.

Levi’s jaw slides. He is still.

The door bangs open, loud and sudden, and Levi pulls his hand away like Erwin’s hot skin had burned him. He doesn’t meet Erwin’s eye, instead, turns and looks at Hanji with an almost suspiciously blank expression on his face. Erwin sees him wipe his palm on his pants. 

“How’s our little meat sack?” Hanji asks loudly, framed by the candle light spilling in from the hallway at their back.

Erwin groans and tries to block the light.

“He’ll live,” Levi proclaims softly. He creates distance then, with only a single glance at Erwin’s face. He moves back to his table and his book and Erwin realizes that the ways Levi doesn’t look at him are just as important as the ways his does. He is not looking now, and Erwin can feel it, how much Levi is not looking at him.

Hanji starts to move into the room, but Erwin croaks, “The light,” to stall them. They kick the door shut and it’s dark again. Erwin needs the dark right now. 

Hanji is not so careful as Levi was. They bound into the room and set the tray they are carrying down on Levi’s bedside table. It occurs to Erwin dizzily that he is in Levi’s bed and once the thought springs into his head, he can’t shake it, even when Hanji sits on the edge of the bed and Erwin’s skn scraps the sheets and his body tries to tighten as if he might roll onto the floor. 

“Drink this,” Hanji insists. 

“What--”

“Just water. Drink.” 

Erwin takes two greedy gulps, dribbling liquid onto his chin like an invalid before Levi says quietly, “Sips. You’ll make yourself sick.”

Erwin might have ignored Hanji; the water tastes too good, is blissfully cold and his mouth had been _so_ dry. But he can’t ignore the grudging words he’d wrung from Levi’s lips, so he slows, drinks carefully, and then falls back against the single pillow. When he closes his eyes, he recalls strange shapes, twisting images he hadn’t been able to escape from. A deep, soothing voice in his ear muttering in another language. He has no idea how long he’s been here. It feels like days. 

Levi sinks back into his chair, looking at the floor as Hanji demands, “Can you sit up?”

Erwin isn’t sure. When he tries, Hanji helps steady him, their hands just as cold as Levi’s but not nearly as gentle. Between the two of them, Erwin manages to swallow a few spoonfuls of broth while Levi watches. It’s good, flavored with beef and garlic, which surprises him.

“--strange that they bothered, is all I’m saying,” Hanji is yammering. Without turning to look at them both, Levi mutters something so low, Erwin can’t hear. “Well, _obviously_ they just wanted to be sure, but it’s still strange. They sent so many people, they can’t have thought he’d _get away._ You need to tell us exactly what Zeke said to you.” It takes Erwin’s tired brain a beat to realize Hanji is talking to him.

“He said,” Erwin begins, voice gravel in his throat.

Levi stands, chair scraping across the floor, and says, “Later, Hanji. Don’t make him talk.”

“I’m fine--”

“Or, by all means, keep gurgling like a consumptive whore, it’s very attractive.” 

Erwin closes his lips. Hanji smirks and tries to shove another spoonful of broth down Erwin’s throat and he’s forced to open his mouth again to protest. 

“Enough, you quack, leave him alone,” Levi snaps, shoving Hanji on the shoulder as he speaks. 

“Living people need to eat, Levi,” Hanji drawls. 

“So he can feed himself, he’s not a fucking invalid, fuck.” 

When they both turn and look at Erwin, he manages to take the bowl pointedly from Hanji without saying anything. It balances precariously on his knee, held in place by his weakened right hand. When they keep staring at him, he rolls his eyes and brings the spoon to his lips with his left. 

Hanji nods, seemingly satisfied, and Levi mutters, “There, see? Now get out, leave us alone.” 

Hanji throws their hands in the air, muttering “Alright, alright,” and allows Levi to usher them back out the door. On the stairwell, Erwin sees Hanji pause, then lean into Levi’s space. The step they’re standing on puts their face level with Levi’s, and they don’t speak loudly, but Erwin can still hear them when they whisper, “ _Us?”_

Levi shuts the door in their face and then locks it. 

“Finish your soup and then I need to check the bandages on your back.” 

“My back?” Erwin mutters, rolling his shoulders stiffly. He feels something drag there, realizes he is indeed bandaged there too. 

Levi’s lips twitch once into what Erwin realizes is actually a smile. “Fuckers stabbed you in the back, Smith. You didn’t notice?” 

Erwin frowns, trying to recall. After the fight, he’d been sore all over, had known he was covered in knicks and bruises. “Arm was distracting,” he realizes. It had throbbed the worst of all and he had assumed it was the deepest slice.

Levi plops back down in the seat he’d occupied before Erwin woke up, and then throws his bare feet into the chair beside him. “Soup.” 

Erwin eats his soup. 

When he has swallowed as much as he can stomach, Levi checks the bandages at his back, and makes a face when he comes close, peering down into Erwin’s half empty soup bowl. 

“Garlic?” Erwin mutters.

A slight wrinkling around Levi’s nose is the only answer he offers. 

“Why bother keeping it here?” Erwin asks. His throat feels a little better now. Levi’s standing close enough that he doesn’t need to speak loudly. 

Levi is silent long enough that Erwin thinks he won’t respond. Then he says, “We eat sometimes. Other things. Hanji likes sweets. Garlic is good for healing. Infection. Sasha likes it.”

“Sasha.” 

“Lives here. She’s not… like us.” 

“A vampire?” 

Levi shakes his head. 

“How many people--humans,” he corrects himself a little uncertainty, “live here?”

Levi grins all at once, shows Erwin his teeth, and says, “Sasha’s not human. Or at least not like you think.” 

“What do you mean?”

“Lay back down.” 

Levi returns to his chair and his book. 

“That’s twice now you’ve saved my life.” Levi doesn’t move, doesn’t tell Erwin he’s heard him at all. But Erwin watches him for a long time and he doesn’t turn the pages of his book. “Thank you.” 

At some point, he sleeps. When he thinks to look again, the sun slating in through the broken shutter is gone and Levi hasn’t moved in hours. 

“What are you reading?”

Levi holds up the book and with an awful jolt, Erwin realizes it’s one of his. 

“Shouldn’t touch that with your bare hands.” 

“No, _you_ shouldn’t,” Levi replies. “Mine are fine.” Erwin thinks of the ancient, yet clearly well cared for books on Levi’s shelf and decides he’s probably right. 

“You read Latin,” he tries instead. 

“I _speak_ Latin.”

Erwin rolls his eyes. No one really _speaks_ Latin. Not like other languages. 

“This barely counts,” Levi adds softly, turning a page. 

Erwin almost laughs. “What. What do you mean?”

Levi huffs an annoyed little breath and says, “This is fucking high class, government, religious bullshit, no one talks like this.” He pauses. “Talked.” There is a thick silence in the room. Erwin doesn’t know what to say. 

“You speak Latin.” Levi turns a page. “Levi, how old are you?”

“Stop asking me that.” 

“Why?”

“Because I don’t know.” He says the words so quietly, Erwin almost doesn’t hear him. Erwin swallows heavily, feels his throat bob and scratch. How could he _not know?_

“You don’t know… what year you were born?”

Levi sniffs, scratches at his chin. “No one ever told me.”

“What about the year you… the year you died?” 

Levi shakes his head, very subtly. His eyes flick once to Erwin and then back down to the book. Erwin is surprised he can even tell, with all the darkness and distance between them, but he can. “Long time ago.” After a beat, he adds, “Never kept count to begin with. Seemed stupid after.” 

Erwin doesn’t understand. Levi’s words make sense but he can’t seem to fit them in his brain. He wants to know more, but he’s scared if he pushes, Levi will squeeze his lips together, keep reading in silence.

“He told me--Zeke Jaeger-- he said they thought you were. Nearly three thousand years old.” 

Levi sighs heavily, as if he’s speaking to an overly curious child, and closes his book. “What year is it?”

“You don’t know--”

“Erwin.” 

Erwin tells him. 

“I guess. That sounds right,” he admits grudgingly. 

Erwin’s heart is beating very fast. “You’re Roman.” _Ancient Roman,_ Erwin thinks. _Before the Roman Empire Roman,_ Erwin thinks. 

Levi nods. 

Erwin wets his lips, and makes his voice light when he says, “That’s why the book isn’t right.”

“What.”

“It’s Classical Latin. It’s… standardized, and more modern. You spoke an older variant. Well, not a variant. What you spoke turned into that,” he explains, pointing. 

Levi considers him, eyes shadowy in the darkness. “Yes. Still, this is…”

“A bit stiff?” Erwin tries. 

Levi smiles. 

Not a little twitch at the corners of his lips. Not the feral grin that is anything but happy. He smiles. 

“It didn’t feel so different when it was happening, when it was all changing,” he admits. “But it’s all gone now.”

“Gone?”

Levi breathes out, a little resigned sigh. “My words are all fucked up. They kinda… run together.”

“And no one speaks Latin anymore,” Erwin realizes, a little sadly. Levi’s _language_ is gone. His mother tongue. Just. _Gone._ How would Erwin feel if his first language just evaporated like that? Did everyone sound foreign to Levi? How many languages had come and gone? How many words in his head had only him left to speak them?

“Everything between then and now. Between.”

“Dying?” Erwin asks.

“And now,” Levi confirms. “It blurs.” He relaxes into his chair a little, tosses his head to knock the hair from his eyes. “Sometimes I think it’s gone completely, but…” He taps Erwin’s book. “You’d be amazed what bullshit you remember when it’s in front of you.”

Erwin stares into the dark shadows and thinks of night flowers, the kind that bloom in the moonlight and are gone when morning comes. 

“You should rest,” Levi says.

Erwin snorts. “I’ve been resting for… how long?”

Levi shrugs. “Not long.”

Erwin stares at him. “When did I come here? Was it last night, or the night before…” Erwin trails off desperately hoping it wasn’t the night before that, that he’d lost so much time. 

Levi looks back down at his book. “Not long.”

Then Erwin understands. He doesn’t know. 

“I’ve done enough resting.”

“Then get out of my room.” When Erwin doesn’t move, just stares uncomfortably into the darkness, Levi adds, “Thought not.”

Erwin feels better than he did a few hours ago, but he’s still fairly certain he’d fall down the stairs if he tried to leave.

“Learning anything?” he tries instead. 

“Nothing I don’t already know,” Levi answers blithely without lifting his head. After he speaks, he looks up and fixes Erwin with a long stare. “Except maybe why you’re so goddamn interested in sigils.” Erwin opens his mouth to stammer out an excuse, but Levi fills the room with the sound of scraping wood when he slides his chair over to the bed and holds up Erwin’s book. “And you mistranslated right there, by the way.” He taps on a word written on a piece of paper Erwin has left wedged between the pages. “You would have blown up half your city if you’d tried to cast this.” 

Erwin chuckles, startled and overly pleased by Levi’s sudden closeness. Erwin can smell him this close, wants to lean over and breathe him in, but it makes him think about his own sick sweat drying on his skin and he leans away instead. “That’s why I didn’t try.”

“Stubborn,” Levi comments. “But at least you’re not stupid.” 

“There was a section at the end I couldn’t…” He trails off when Levi starts to flip pages and comes to the last piece of paper Erwin has stored. He starts to read, quietly, a little haltingly, like he might stop at any second, and Erwin says nothing, because he wants to listen, because Levi’s voice feels like a gift and Erwin isn’t sure he’s worthy of it. He reads the Latin first, and the words sound strange in his mouth, accented in ways Erwin would never think. Then he reads it in English and Erwin doesn’t realize when he’s done. He’s still tired, still aching from head to toe, and Levi’s voice is soothing.

“So,” Levi says quietly. 

“Beautiful,” Erwin mumbles sleepily. 

“What?”

“The way you say those words. It’s beautiful.” 

Levi closes the book, and pushes his chair back to the table. Erwin isn’t sure if he’s said the wrong thing, but it is very clear that the conversation is over. 

*

It’s not long before Hanji knocks on the door and enters baring another bowl of soup and a dark, crystal decanter that they hand to Levi. Erwin can sit up in the bed without help now; he accepts the bowl. Hanji doesn’t stay long; Levi tells them to get back to the front door. He finally lights a candle after they leave; Erwin winces against the flare of light, but it’s not too bright and eating soup in the dark isn’t exactly easy. It’s heartier now, with chunks of beef and a few potatoes. As Erwin tries to find a comfortable position to hold the bowl, he watches Levi silently pour from the decanter. The decanter is clear, Erwin realizes. It’s simply filled with a thick, dark liquid that looks black as Levi tilts it into a glass. He isn’t looking at Erwin as he sits back down, stares into a (different) book and brings the glass to his lips. 

Erwin wants to ask him why. Why not go downstairs and find a willing donor? Why have Hanji deliver him a bottle full of blood like it’s fine wine? Doesn’t it go foul? 

But he doesn’t say anything because the way Levi is not looking at him is important. He empties half the decanter before he corks it again, and leaves it sitting on the table. 

When Erwin is done with his soup and Levi is done with his blood, and the candle is still guttering, Erwin says, “What are you reading now?” It’s not one of his books. It’s too thin, too new. 

Levi gives him a rueful, almost weary look. “It’s. It’s poetry.”

“ _Poetry.”_

“Petra brought it back from the city,” Levi mutters, running his hand over the back of his closely shorn head.

“You like poetry?” Erwin asks, tilting forward on the bed a little. There’s a slightly taunting quality to his voice, light hearted and unintended. He’s almost surprised Levi reads so much at all. He can tell by the way Levi’s eyes narrow that his teasing has not gone unnoticed. 

“It’s in Latin,” Levi drawls, as if that explains it. 

Erwin doesn’t know Latin poetry. His education was more austere than that. “Will you read it to me?” He knows as soon as he says the words that he’s pressing too hard, that Levi’s newly found proclivity for actually speaking to him is still subject to Levi’s mercurial whims. 

Levi’s face is smooth, expressionless, but there’s a certain… quality to his eyes that Erwin can’t name. Annoyance or amusement or apprehension… or none of them or all of them. 

Levi blinks once at him, cat-like, and then turns the page. 

Erwin is able to follow along when he starts to read at first, though his accent twists the words and makes them unfamiliar. A few lines in, Erwin hears a word he doesn’t know, and the rest blur after that. Whatever it is, it’s beautiful. 

“Did you get all that?” Levi asks laconically 

Erwin shakes his head, repeats the first phrase he can recall that he didn’t understand. 

Levi kicks his bare feet into the chair, arms crossed over his chest, and says, “Prick.” 

“Excuse me?” Erwin can’t have heard him right. 

“Well, more like,” he pauses, then holds his hands up, shoulder width apart, and says, with zero inflection in his voice, “Huge throbbing cock.” His eyes flick to the ceiling and he muses to himself, “Full cock? Dripping cock?” 

Erwin’s cheeks are burning. Levi is toying with him, Erwin _knows_ he is, but that still doesn’t change the fact that no one has ever spoken like this in front of him before, and worse, hearing _Levi_ of all people voice _those words--_

Erwin clears his throat, and asks weakly about the last word in the poem. 

“In this language you’d say,” Levi mutters, clearly enjoying himself a little too much, “Come-soaked lips? That’s about right.” 

“I thought you said this was poetry,” Erwin replies. Levi is reading him… Erwin doesn’t know what Levi is reading but it’s not like any poetry Erwin is familiar with. 

“It is.” Levi tosses the book, still open, onto the bed with Erwin; Erwin is almost afraid to touch it. When Levi just looks at him, he reaches over, willing the blush to fall out of his cheeks, and turns back to the page Levi had been reading from. Catullus. Poem 80. 

“You can read that one,” Levi tells him. While Erwin had been looking down, he’d crossed over to his bookshelf and started thumbing the spines of his collection. “I’ve read it already.” 

Erwin glares at him as he settles into his seat again, turning his new book to the first page. He pauses long enough to refill his glass from the decanter. It is as if Erwin isn’t there at all. 

Erwin refuses to touch the book. The sheer vulgarity of it makes him feel shameful just for sitting near it. But time passes. Levi doesn’t speak to him. He refuses to break the silence first. And he has been sleeping a _very_ long time. 

Levi sees him when he finally picks up the book. But he doesn’t say anything, just smirks into his page, and once more lifts his glass. 


	5. Chapter 5

“This one?” Erwin asks, holding up the book with his thumb under the word. Levi peers at it over Erwin’s shoulder as he tends to the healing knife marks on Erwin’s back. 

“Face-fuck.” 

Erwin breathes out in amusement and shakes his head. He’s translated half the book on a ragged sheaf of paper Levi had handed him, and every word that has given him pause has been some foul slang. Levi clearly enjoys the way Erwin squirms when he speaks such crudeness; Erwin desperately hopes he doesn’t know why though. Doesn’t know that it’s not the words themselves, that it’s not the sheer commonness of them. It’s how Levi says them. How his deep, rich voices curls and coils around filth like fragrant smoke, how it makes Erwin want to breathe him in. 

He has pages of unknown words waiting for a definition, but he can only bare to ask Levi to translate one or two at a time. These words in that voice… it’s simply too much. 

“Stretch.” 

Erwin sets his book down and obeys, arches his back into Levi’s palm. “That’s better,” he admits. He can sit up in bed without help now, and all his hurts are fading. His stomach rumbles _loudly_ at the shift in position, and Levi breathes a little half chuckle. Hanji (or, once or twice, Petra) has usually come with food by now-- food for the both of them. Erwin doesn’t want to ask after them, but he’s starting to approach ravenous. 

Almost as if he has read his mind, Levi says, “The kitchen is down the stairs, down the hall, and to the right. The last door before the stairwell to the cellar.”

Erwin cranes his head and tries to peer over his shoulder. 

Levi’s eyes lift once from his task. He is rubbing some kind of fragrant salve on Erwin’s back--this has become a twice daily ritual over the last three days. The first time it had happened, the day after Levi had given him the book, he’d held himself so still his jaw ached. Now, he has grown accustomed to thinking of other things, _anything_ but Levi’s hands on his skin, and the thick, oily slick of the salve. 

“I can go downstairs?” Erwin asks wryly. He’s tried to stand at least half a dozen times and except when he’d needed to relieve himself, Levi hadn’t let him. 

Levi drops the shirt Erwin is wearing (not his own, but rather collected from somewhere inside the house) and Erwin feels the cheap fabric stick to the oily salve. But Levi hadn’t bandaged him; that has to be a good sign. 

“You got legs, don’t you?” Levi bites. 

Erwin finds the kitchen easily enough. It is strange walking through the house when he’s been confined to a bed for nearly a week. He keeps expecting someone to stop him, but no one does. He throws open the door to the kitchen, a little shaky on his feet, but far too focused on his stomach to care. 

There are people in the kitchen. There are _many_ people in the kitchen. They are all laughing, talking jovially to one another, but when Erwin throws open the door, they all turn and look at him in surprise. 

“Well _shit,”_ one of them-- a light haired, muscular young man-- drawls in amusement. “Look who’s standing.”

Erwin has the ludacris thought that he is underdressed. He’d never greet people like this; his shirt is too short in the sleeves and too wide in the chest and his trousers are tight through the buttocks and thigh and riding up his calves. He’s barefoot, hair mussed, and hasn’t had a proper bath all week. “Um. Hello.” 

They’re not human. Erwin can sense it just by looking. The man who had spoken to him has the porcelain skin and unflinching grace of a vampire, as does the slight elfen man--boy really-- with yellow blond hair and a dangerously intelligent look in his eye sitting at the table. 

There is a young woman who hasn’t stopped eating her baked potato to look at Erwin; she seems normal, mostly, but there is some quality to the ravenous way she is eating that has Erwin second guessing her true nature. 

There is a woman, tall, lithe, frighteningly beautiful but not in the way the vampires are. When Erwin looks at her, he could swear her flat, expressionless eyes are burning, is sure, for a moment, that he sees literal flame. 

And there is the man she is standing behind-- olive skinned, with enormous green eyes that make Erwin look twice, and a sort of manic fierceness in his gaze that gives Erwin his first real chill of unease in days. The man looks dangerous in a way Erwin can’t immediately place.

There is also the tall, dark skinned Ymir, and the petite sweet-faced blonde who had bitten his wrist.

“How’s it going, blondie?” Ymir demands, slow and taunting, when she catches Erwin looking at her.

“Erwin.” 

They all stare at him. 

“My name. It’s Erwin.” 

The blonde smiles sweetly at him. “You had everyone worried.” 

Erwin smiles; he is sure that isn’t true. “Levi is a good doctor,” he says. 

Silences greets that proclamation. “Right,” says the first man finally. They keep staring at him. 

“Is there anything to eat?” he says finally, when the way they stare starts to crawl under his skin. His eyes fall on the woman eating the baked potato at the same time every head in the room turns to look at her. 

”Why ya looking at me?” she demands roughly through a mouthful of potato crumbs. 

“Are there more of those?” Erwin asks as politely as he can. He doesn’t see any servants; he’s not sure who’s supposed to give him his food. 

The girl with the potato stares at him sullenly from under her brows. Then she jerks her head to a cabinet behind her and Erwin understands he will find food there. When he carefully steps into the room, he feels all of them looking at him, but they still resume conversation. Erwin doesn’t hear what they are saying. He stares now at a bag of uncooked potatoes and realizes they expect him to prepare his own food. 

Erwin has no idea how to bake a potato. He assumes it isn’t difficult, but he’s never prepared a single crumb of his own food in his life. He’s been staring at the bag of potatoes for too long. He leans forward into the cabinet as if he’s going to grab one, just to add some motion to his body. Then he pauses again. 

“Something wrong, _Erwin?”_ It’s Ymir who speaks. When Erwin pulls back from the cabinet, he finds her staring at him with her arms crossed. Everyone else turns to look at him too. 

“Uh. No. It’s just that…” Before Erwin can speak, every head in the room, all at once, lifts and looks at the ceiling. Erwin feels an awful chill rise along the back of his neck. 

Then Ymir and the man she is standing beside both snort. He says, “Well, I’m not doing it.” 

All of them are looking at the girl with the potato again. “Me!” she groans. Then she turns to Erwin and says skeptically, “You really can’t cook?”

Erwin stares at them. He must look alarmed because the small blond man smiles and says, “We can hear Levi. Upstairs. He said you probably don’t know how to cook.” 

Erwin smiles in spite of himself. Whatever Levi had said, it’s clear from the way the blond man hesitated before he spoke that he had censored Levi’s words. 

“You can hear him that clearly?” 

“And he can hear us,” the blond answers. 

“Well, he’s right,” Erwin says with an annoyed yet fond glance at the ceiling. “I have no idea how to prepare one of these.” He jerks his shoulder at the open cabinet. 

The girl with the potato says, “There’s other food, you know. You don’t know how to make anything?” 

“No, I’m sorry.” 

“Well, as amusing as it would be to watch you try to make sense of a potato,” Ymir cuts with a slow drawl, “I think I’m gonna see what’s going on in the cellar.” She turns and smiles at the blonde woman, very sweetly, and says, “Historia?” 

“Yes, alright,” Historia says.

The two women take their leave, and so does the man who had been standing beside Ymir-- Erwin learns his name is Jean when the blond man offers him a farewell.

“I’ll show you how to cook but you have to share,” the woman with the potato says as soon as the door closes after Jean. 

Erwin thinks this sounds fair enough. “What did you say your name was?”

“Sasha,” she answers, pushing by him and rummaging in the cupboards.

“And I’m Armin,” the blond man says cheerfully. “And that’s Eren and Mikasa.” 

Erwin looks to the two named; Eren is considering him with a strange, smouldering sort of look in his eyes, his arms crossed over his chest and his chin lifted, while Mikasa just _stares._ When Erwin glances sideways at Armin, Mikasa’s eyes slide off of him, and Eren jerks his chin in a course greeting. The unease prickling along Erwin’s skin intensifies. 

Erwin watches Sasha pulling things from the cabinets-- pans, spices, more potatoes. When she’s done, she retrieves meat from the cold box and lays it all out on the table. 

“Alright, Pay attention,” she commands. “Cooking is an art.” 

It is an art Erwin has no talent for. But Sasha still teaches him how to make a passable baked potato, and how to grill a chicken breast on the stove. When she starts chopping garlic, Armin and Eren both make disgusted faces and leave, Mikasa trailing after them like a spector. 

“Good riddance,” Sasha says cheerfully, popping a whole clove of garlic into her mouth while she chops the rest. “If you’re gonna be staying here for a while, I suggest you eat a lot of this stuff. Keeps the bloodsuckers from getting too friendly.” 

“As if we’d bother with you.” Erwin jerks around in his seat and finds Levi lounging against the door frame. “Even without the garlic stink, _you_ still smell like a half-dead dog.” 

“Better half dead than a walking corpse,” Sasha sings. 

Levi smirks once and then folds himself into an empty chair. Erwin wants to pry. He wants to know exactly how many different creatures live here and exactly what their natures are, but something tells him it would be rude to ask. Instead, he listens to Sasha and Levi bicker; Sasha explains every move she makes in the preparation of the meal, and Levi tells her which spices she should be using on the meat. They argue about the best combinations, what will taste better, and Sasha gripes that Levi won’t even eat what she’s making. It’s not until the chicken is in the pan that Erwin puts it all together-- that Levi had been suggesting herbs with medicinal qualities, and that Sasha knows a bit about healing herbs herself. The chicken, made almost entirely by Sasha’s hand, is much better than the baked potato Erwin tried to roast.

By the time he is done with the meal he is exhausted again. As eager as he had been for the chance to walk on his own two feet, now the thought of climbing the stairs to Levi’s attic is a chore of its own. 

He watches Levi and Sasha talk. They snipe at each other, Levi offering crass insults in a deadpan, inflectionless tone. Sasha doesn’t seem bothered by it. In fact, as Levi’s dog-related insults get more biting and colorful, she only smiles and sticks her tongue out at him. 

If Erwin wasn’t so exhausted, he’d be fascinated by the way Levi interacts with his people. He says terrible, vicious things to them, cuts them to shreds with his sharp tongue and rough vocabulary, and it only seems to amuse them. 

They still listen to him though. Without hesitation. As Erwin watches Levi and Sasha talk, he begins to realize that Levi could probably tell Sasha to stick her hand in the fire and she’d do it without question, sure that he had a good reason. For all her griping, she’d spiced the chicken she’d made exactly as Levi had told her to. 

The moment Erwin is through with his food, Levi sweeps his plates away and starts scrubbing them, sleeves pushed up past his elbows, muscular forearms flexing with the vigor with which he is cleaning. Erwin finds it very bizarre, watching the lord of this house do chores. But then Sasha stands and starts helping him, and Erwin watches them both in silence for about five full seconds before he hesitantly stands as well. 

“Sit,” Levi commands without turning around. “You can barely sit up straight.” 

“I’m alright,” Erwin mutters. But he is happy to sink back into the chair. 

“You’re gray,” Sasha tells him when she turns and starts wiping the table with vinegar. “I can finish this, Captain.” 

“Shit no, I’ve seen the way you clean,” Levi returns. 

Sasha rolls her eyes. “You can check behind me later,” she answers pointedly. When Levi turns and looks at her over his shoulder, she motions at Erwin with just a look, and Levi shakes the water from his hands. 

Levi doesn’t say anything to Erwin, just jerks his head and Erwin follows. It never even occurs to him to argue. 

“Captain?” he asks, when the kitchen door has closed behind him. 

“Old nickname,” Levi answers cryptically. 

He leads Erwin back up the stairs and by the time they reach the third floor, Erwin is struggling not to sag against the wall. But instead of continuing on up to the attic, Levi turns and walks off down the hallway. It’s not a long walk. He stops at the first door he comes to, positioned just to the right of the staircase to the attic. When he throws the door open, Erwin sees a small, neat room with a bed, a vanity and wash basin, a wardrobe and a trunk, a small shelf, and an end table. The books he brought from home are already sitting neatly on the shelf, and Levi’s poem book is sitting on the end table next to the bed, along with the papers Erwin had been using for his translation. 

Erwin steps into the room; Levi hovers in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest. 

“I get my own room now,” he comments blithely. 

He doesn’t like it. 

“I want my bed back.” Levi’s voice is bordering on annoyance, but when Erwin meets his eyes, he can tell there is amusement there. 

“I was under the impression you didn’t actually sleep,” Erwin tells him, sitting gratefully on the trunk at the foot of the bed. He hadn’t once seen Levi even close his eyes to rest. 

“Then why would I have a bed?” 

Erwin pauses, mouth half open in a response, and then lifts his brows. 

Levi rolls his eyes. “Pervert.” And then he shuts the door, throwing Erwin into darkness. 

Erwin chuckles to himself, starts to feel behind him so he can crawl onto the bed, and freezes when he hears a voice. 

“Captain.” 

He hears Levi sigh, imagines he’s standing on the first step to his attic. Erwin can picture him, deadpan, casual, almost, but not quite, inscrutable. 

“You want some company?” 

Levi chuckles. “I don’t need your kinda company, Jaeger.” 

Erwin jerks in place, leans forward toward the door. _Jaeger?_

“Last time you gave me some _company_ your little guardian angel tried to take my head off.” 

“Like she can lay a hand on you.” 

“She _did_ lay a hand on me, brat, she broke my fucking fingers.” 

“It’s fine. Mikasa’s fine, she was just… confused.” 

Levi laughs once, a low amused sound that raises chills along Erwin’s skin. “Let go of me, Eren.” He’s not angry. In fact there’s something almost suggestive in his tone, and Erwin suddenly imagines they are standing very close together. 

“Why don’t you make me?” 

Erwin’s stomach rolls. Eren’s voice is light, playful. Erwin pictures him sitting in the kitchen, all brown skin and the greenest eyes Erwin has ever seen and he wants to hit something. 

“You’re too young for me, kid,” Levi says fondly. His voice is a little louder now, like he’s moved away. 

“You know, _sir,_ one of these centuries, that excuse is gonna start ringing a little false, doncha think?” 

“You can come find me then.” 

“Is this about him?” 

“Why would it be?” Levi’s voice has lost its fondness. He answers a little too quickly. 

“I can smell him on you.” Erwin realizes with a surprised jolt that he is ‘him.’ “Smell _you_ on him.” 

“Eren.” 

“Those were your teeth marking his neck.” 

“He was _poisoned._ By your fucking family, I might add.”

“Ah, don’t call him that, we’re barely related.”

“You brats amaze me. If one more person asks me why I didn’t let him die--”

“Why _didn’t_ you let him die?” 

“Eren.”

“I’m serious, Levi! It’s not like you to go to this much trouble for some nosey human.” 

“They attacked him because he refused to help them. He could have tried to burn this whole place down around our ears and he wouldn’t do it. Kinda man would I be if I let him bleed out in the backyard?” 

“So we’re men now?” Eren asks wryly. 

“The day we stop believing that is the day we turn into the monsters they think we are.” 

There is a moment of silence, though Erwin hasn’t heard either of them move away. 

Then Eren says, “You know. If it _was_ about him. I wouldn’t blame you. He looks like he could lift a horse.” 

Levi laughs, and it’s a little startled and incredibly amused. “You can lift a horse.” 

“Yeah, but he _looks_ like he can.” 

“Good night, Eren.” 

Eren snorts. “Night, night, Captain.” 

“Hey, check behind Sasha in the kitchen. She always misses the corners of the table.” 

Eren responds only with a light chuckle, and Erwin hears him move away, is able to follow his light, but unguarded steps down the stairs. 

Then Levi says, “Did you get all that?”

Erwin releases a breath, an odd tightness in his shoulders. His heart is racing and his chest is a swirl of competing emotion that he refuses, for now, to name. When he doesn’t say anything, the door clicks open, filling the room again with dim candle light. Levi slips inside and closes it behind him. 

“Eren Jaeger,” Erwin says. He hadn’t known what he was going to say until the words left his mouth. 

Levi is quiet for a beat. “Eren Jaeger.” 

“They’re… related.” 

“They’re related,” Levi says. “Zeke is Eren’s…. Great-nephew. Eren’s father was Zeke’s grandfather. Plus a handful of ‘greats’” 

“How?” 

“How?” Levi parrots. 

“Is it just a coincidence?” 

Erwin hears Levi’s breath in the dark, a short, sarcastic sound. “Of course not.” Erwin waits. “I… made Eren like me.” Erwin doesn’t know why this surprises him. He knows even less why it hurts him. But it does. “His family… never forgave me.” Erwin doesn’t know what to say. When he doesn’t reply, when time stretches, Levi says, “He was going to die, you know. Fought a fucking war. Lived. Saved lives. Just to get stabbed in the back walking through town a week before he could go home.”

Levi’s voice feels coarse in Erwin’s ears, and the aching in his chest gets stronger. “Mikasa?” he asks sharply, suddenly desperate to shift the subject, just a little. 

“What about her?” 

“Is she… you called her an angel.” 

Levi snorts. “She’s a goddamn demon is what she is.” 

“She’s not like you.” 

“No. She’s not like any of us.” 

“What is she, then?” 

Levi shrugs. Erwin blinks into the darkness. “She...showed up not long after I found him. Never left.”

“You found him.”

“I knew him before. From the fighting. Battlefields can be good places for us.”

He doesn’t elaborate, but Erwin doesn’t need him to. Fields full of dying men. Levi would just need to put a few out of their misery. It would be a mercy.

“Is that why he calls you ‘Captain?’”

“Yes. He’s… he’s a good kid,” Levi says finally. “Didn’t seem right to just let him die.” 

“No,” Erwin answers. “I suppose it wouldn’t. Do you… have you made a lot of people like Eren?” 

“No,” Levi says, and his voice is sharper than Erwin has ever heard it. “No. Eren’s the only one. Still living,” he adds. “Or. Well. Standing. I don’t. I don’t like to do that.” 

“No?”

Levi sighs. “You should go to sleep.” Erwin doesn’t move. Neither does Levi. Erwin wishes he could see him in the darkness. He knows Levi can see him and it doesn’t seem fair. 

“When can I go home?” 

Erwin feels his chest loosen the second he asks the question. It has been hovering just behind his lips for hours, days, and he’s been too selfish to speak it, to admit that at some point, he would have to get out of Levi’s bed, and his attic, put down his filthy poem book. He can’t stay here forever. And looking around this tiny room, empty of his books and his clothes and his research… he can’t stay here forever.

“Petra has been watching your house,” Levi says after a long, pregnant pause. “She hasn’t seen anyone go in or out, but she says the bodies were all removed. We don’t know what they’re doing during the day.” 

“So you don’t know.” 

“No.”

Erwin nods into the dark. No one will notice if he’s gone. He’s locked himself into the house for weeks at a time, refusing all visitors, refusing to see anyone but his servants. 

But the servants are a different matter. They have families, lives outside of the manor. Erwin’s chest aches for them. 

“If the house stands empty for too long, someone will notice,” he says. “I should hire a steward.” 

“A steward.” 

“Someone to tend to my affairs. Make it look like I left town, and like the house is being cared for.” 

“We can talk with Hanji tomorrow.” Erwin nods, knowing Levi can see him. “Good night.” 

It is a very long time before Erwin is able to fall asleep. 

*

It is days before he sees Levi again. He is allowed to explore the house, to wander the halls at his leisure, to eat whenever he feels like, to spend as much or as little time in his room as he cares to. He has to ask Hanji about bathing, hoping desperately that the water spout behind the house is not his only option. Hanji looks at him blankly when he asks, as if they cannot imagine why he would possibly want to take a _bath,_ but they still have Ymir and Jean bring a metal tub filled with hot water to his room. Ymir snipes at him, claims it’s not her job to pamper him, but Erwin doesn’t rise to her bait. He is too relieved that he is allowed a proper bath. It loosens his stiff limbs, softens the scars forming on his back. 

By the fourth day he is irritable and anxious. Levi hasn’t come out of his room. Erwin has translated all he can without Levi’s help, so he doesn’t even have that to pose as a distraction-- not that it had been a particularly wise distraction, picking through dirty poems he has inextricably linked to Levi in his head. He explores the third floor, trying to calm the useless feeling in his chest. He wants to reclaim his home. He wants to make a plan. He wants to see Levi. 

The third floor is mostly empty-- the residents maintain rooms on the first two floors, and only a few live here. Eren, Mikasa, and Armin are the only ones Erwin sees up here with any regularity. Armin spends most of his time here, Erwin has deduced. They have passed each other in the halls, and Armin is always friendly. More than once, Erwin has seen him returning to his room with books in hand, and he has begun to wonder if there is a library here, somewhere. The fact that no one has offered to show it to him, even after he complained to Hanji of boredom, makes him think he isn’t technically supposed to help himself to whatever books are hidden away in this place. 

That is why he has decided to search alone, and why he hasn’t asked Armin for his help. 

He comes out of his room and turns down the hallway he sees Armin coming from most often. There is a door at the end of this hall, blocking off the east wing of the third floor from the rest of the house. Erwin steps lightly through the door, and feels a little thrill of mischief run up his spine when the door closes behind him. It is dark here-- there are no candles and any window has been barred against the late evening sun. There are empty bedrooms, each door cracked open. When Erwin peers inside, illuminating the rooms with the single candle he carries, he sees bare walls and beds without linens, each one waiting for an occupant. Like the rest of the house, it is spotlessly clean, but it is so silent, Erwin knows no one ever comes here. Except perhaps Armin. 

He comes to a closed door, more richly carved than any others in this hall, and knows instinctively that this is the room he is looking for. He can see all the way to the end of this hall, in the flickering light of the candle, and every single door is cracked open except this one. 

Erwin tries the knob. 

It is locked. 

He considers going back to his room. But he has been cooped up for so long, and some not particularly small part of him is livid with Levi for leaving him to his own devices in this endless manor for days on end. Most of the residents avoid him, or are disinterested in him. The ones who seem willing to speak to him-- Ymir, Eren, Jean-- look at him suspiciously, like he is a puzzle and they aren’t sure why he confuses them. Sasha is interested in nothing but food. Armin seems like the kind of man Erwin could have a conversation with, but he is shy, reserved, and Erwin hasn’t yet been so desperate for company as to push him. Hanji is so busy running the place with Levi gone, that whenever Erwin seeks them out, they only spare him a few minutes before they are urging him to go entertain himself in the cellar. “Your money is still good here,” they tell him, grinning with all their teeth. 

Erwin tries the knob again, and when it doesn’t turn, he looks instead at the door hinges. It is simple enough to pop the pins out. He removes his candle from the candlestick, and sticks it to the floor with a few drips of wax. Then he uses the candlestick to loosen the pins. Once they are loose, it is nothing for him to pull them out with his hands. He’s strong enough and tall enough that even the top one doesn’t really cause him any difficulty. 

The hardest part is slipping inside without damaging the locking mechanism. But he manages to squeeze through. 

It is very dark inside. By the light of his candle, Erwin spots a sconce and lights it. He almost drops the candle he is holding when five other flames all spring to life, and the room blazes into focus. 

He was right. It is a library. 

And it is the most incredible library he has ever seen. 

The smell of ancient parchment and bound leather is overwhelming. But Erwin doesn’t just see old books. He sees scrolls. He sees _clay tablets._ There are glass cases that look like Levi’s shelf upstairs-- filled with stones and crystals and feathers and strange twists of string. In the center of the room is a huge table spread with paper and ink, and even from here, Erwin can see… strange symbols carved into the wood. He takes a step forward, eager to look closer--

And feels his whole body freeze in place without his permission. He tries to lift his feet and they stick to the floor. He tries to lower his chin and cannot stop baring his throat to the empty room. He cannot wiggle his fingers. He cuts his gaze sideways, and watches hot wax drip from his candle. When it lands on his hand he cannot even hiss at the pain. 

That is when true panic sets in. He cannot even yell for help. 

“Nosey shit.” 

His heart skips fearfully in his chest even as his stomach coils once in pleasure at the _sound_ of that voice. 

Figures the bastard would show up exactly when Erwin was least interested in seeing him. 

A litany of complaints are on his lips but he can’t open his mouth to release them. Levi walks, infuriatingly casual, into Erwin’s line of sight, and examines him with a toe-curling smirk on his pretty lips. He doesn’t say anything, just lets his eyes track from Erwin’s head to his toes. 

When another hot drip of wax falls onto Erwin’s skin, Levi steps forward and blows the candle out. 

“If you wanted to see the library you could have asked,” Levi says in amusement, a very frustrating sparkle in his eye. Erwin can’t respond, so he has to settle for glaring. “Oh right.” 

Levi lifts his hand, lays two cold fingers across Erwin’s lips, and it blinds him, as if someone has blown out all the candles. He can’t remember to be angry, or embarrassed, or to feel guilty. He doesn’t remember the hot pain on the curve of his wrist from where the wax had fallen, or the way his heart is beating far faster than is comfortable. He can’t even remember how angry he is at Levi. 

It’s an absent, chaste touch. Levi drops his hand without apparently noticing that Erwin’s brain stopped working entirely. Erwin stares at him in shock, and then realizes he can speak. 

“Levi.” He says the name because he has to, because he hasn’t seen Levi in four days and he hasn’t said the word out loud in all that time. He loves the way it tastes, the way it settles in his mouth, on the tip of his his tongue and pinched between lip and teeth. 

“You took the fucking door off the hinges.” 

“Should I have knocked?”

Levi rolls his eyes, shakes his head. 

“What is this?” Erwin demands. 

“Wards,” Levi replies smugly. 

Erwin blinks. “But I still got in.”

“The wards around the house keep people out. The wards on this room keep you in,” Levi explains. “So I can see who the fuck is trying to go through my things,” he adds quietly, a hint of danger in his voice. 

He stares at Erwin. 

Erwin stares back and wonders if this line was worth crossing. 

“What are you looking for.” Levi says it like a statement, and Erwin feels sick to his stomach at the bland tone of his voice, at the way he isn’t looking Erwin in the eye anymore, at how _casual_ he is being. It stinks of resignation. Of _They told me so._

“I was bored,” Erwin answers honestly, _earnestly._ The idea that Levi might not believe him makes his stomach turn. “I was just looking for something to read.” 

Levi stares some more and Erwin can tell he doesn’t believe him at all. 

“You’ve been gone for _four days,”_ Erwin snaps. He’s tired of trying to look at Levi with his chin raised; he already has to look down to see Levi and now he’s staring at his own nose. 

Levi’s eyes widen once before his face clears into passivity again, and he says, “Have I?” 

“Can you undo whatever… _this_ is? Having to look down at you like this is making me dizzy.” 

Levi crosses his arms over his chest and stares at a wall. “Four days, you said?”

Erwin doesn't think he's supposed to respond. Levi's voice is absent, his face distant and unseeing and Erwin wonders what a day is to a man who has lived a thousand years. It must be even less for one who has lived for three.

“I finished with the poems,” he says quietly. “Well, what I can,” he adds. 

“What did you think?” Levi asks, voice honed once more into a sharp edge. 

“I think you Romans are utterly depraved.” 

Levi breathes a little laugh and Erwin imagines-- hopes, really-- that he has soothed some of his misgivings. 

But now his neck is starting to hurt and Levi is still just _staring_ at him in a way that makes Erwin think of the night they met, of the way Levi had-- 

But he's been different ever since, Erwin realizes. Careful. Casual in a way that is almost pointed. And for all his crude words, for all the times he has laid his hands on Erwin’s skin, he has always kept a certain distance between them. 

Erwin realizes Levi is staring at his throat. He has been for a long time and it chills Erwin to the bone because Levi has looked at him nearly everywhere but here and again, Erwin hadn't quite noticed. 

He remembers the way he'd had to fight, to throw Levi from his lap. He remembers the shock in Levi's eyes, the way Levi had been so gentle and then _so rough_ all at once. He thinks of circus lions and house pets, remembers that even the tamest hound will bite its master’s hand if it's hungry, desperate enough. 

Levi is no lapdog. And Erwin was never his master. 

“Your heart is beating so fast,” Levi mutters suddenly, piercing Erwin with his voice, so he thinks of death again, of dying on Levi's lips and what a lovely end that would be. 

“Magic,” Erwin answers. Erwin doesn't like to lie. But Levi cannot know what he does to Erwin, how the very thought of him makes Erwin’s whole body burn so that he craves the gentle relief of Levi's cold skin like water, how the silver in his eyes makes Erwin feel small and Erwin has never known how much he needs that.

Levi steps forward, hand outstretched, and Erwin’s most rebellious instinct whispers, _you wouldn't be able to fight this time. He has you. However he wants you._

Levi lays his hand on Erwin’s chest, and Erwin almost closes his eyes to savor the contact. 

All at once he can move again and he actually stumbles to one knee, his muscles disconcertingly unused to exerting effort to keep him standing. 

Levi is already gone, crossing the room, thumbing through some books in a way that is simply _too_ casual. 

But Erwin is beginning to know him.

“I'm sorry.” 

Levi grunts. 

“What is all this?” Erwin presses, perhaps unwisely. They aren't normal books. 

“Mostly spell books.” 

Erwin laughs a little incredulously as he stares around the room. “You really are a witch.” 

Levi turns and looks at him. 

“Jaeger--Zeke,” he corrects himself, thinking of Eren, “Said you were.” 

Levi frowns and looks at Erwin as if he is very stupid. 

“I just mean. I can cast a spell. Doesn't make me a witch.” 

Levi snorts. “That's the fucking truth.” 

Erwin looks around and realizes if he were to examine the room more closely, Levi wouldn't stop him. He takes a tentative step toward the table in the middle of the room, and then another. 

There are several books spread across the table, all open and waiting. There is parchment with strange symbols, and small, neat, obsessively careful writing in a thin, elegant script. It looks like Levi has been working on translating something, but then Erwin sees the book he had been translating from and furrows his brow. 

“What is all this?” 

“Book,” Levi says without lifting his head.

Erwin looks down again. “I don't understand.” 

“What,” Levi sighs, appearing at Erwin’s side just a touch too quickly. 

“It looks like you were translating this,” Erwin says, pointing to the book. 

“I was. That's--” 

“I know this book,” Erwin says, pointing to the ancient, nameless tome. “Shouldn't this be simple for you to read?” The book is just a story book, a collection of Greek and Roman myths focusing on the goddess Hecate. It is written in Latin, and is exceptional mainly because of its age and rarity, not its contents. 

“You don't know this book,” Levi says flippantly. 

“Yes, I do,” Erwin insists. “I have a copy.” 

Levi laughs derisively. “You _do not_ have a copy of this book.” 

“Yes, I do,” Erwin answers smugly. “I hunted it down a few weeks ago. I was supposed to have the only copy on this continent though,” Erwin says with a frown as he stares at Levi's. The illustrations are not as elaborate, and the writing slants a little to the right. But there is no mistaking it is the same text. 

Levi is very quiet. “You. Have a copy of this book.”

“Yes.” 

“You… got it a few weeks ago.” 

“Yes.” 

“Why.”

“I was researching sigil stones,” Erwin mutters. “It appeared in some of my searches for related text. But it was totally useless,” Erwin adds, looking down at Levi's table. “Just a book of stories.” 

Levi picks the book up and holds it out under Erwin’s nose. “This book. This book right here. You left a copy of this book _in your house?_ ” 

“Yes,” Erwin says in some alarm, staring down at the pages Levi is pointing to. 

Levi curses, long and soft, in Latin. And Greek? 

“Levi, what's the matter,” Erwin half drawls. “It's safe in my library. I know how to care for rare books.” 

“In your library, that's what I'm afraid of,” Levi counters, setting the book back on the table.

“It's just a book of myths,” Erwin presses.

“It's encoded, you complete idiot. They're not myths, they're spells.” 

“ _Encoded?”_

“Yes,” Levi drawls, tapping the open book with one finger. “If you really _left it_ in your _house,_ we have to get it back _tonight.”_

 _“_ What? Why?” 

“Because I used this book to cast the wards on this house. If that fucking _animal_ gets his hands on it…” 

He starts stalking toward the door and then stops to whirl back and stare at Erwin. “You're positive it's the same book?” 

Erwin shrugs once and starts listing off some of the myths he'd read. Before he is through, Levi is cursing again. 

“Follow me. I hope you're up for a little trip.” 

*

They take a carriage; Eren drives it. 

When they pull up in front of Erwin’s house, Levi stares at it through the curtain for a long time before he says, “It’s empty. Let’s go.” 

“You want backup, Captain?” Eren demands as they start to climb out of the cab.

Levi shakes his head. “Stay within hearing but stay out of sight. I’ll call if I need you.” He glances at Erwin’s collar. “Tell Eren he can come in.” 

Erwin looks at Eren. “Eren, you can come into my house.” He looks back at Levi and Levi nods. 

“Got it?” Levi says to Eren. 

“Yes, sir,” Eren answers succinctly, tilting his head once in acknowledgement like a good soldier. 

“Would you like me to accompany you?” 

Erwin can tell Levi is just as shocked as he is when Mikasa, hunching low in the driver’s seat beside Eren, speaks up. Even Eren looks at her in surprise. She adjusts the red scarf she always seems to be wearing higher around her chin and just looks. 

“Keep the brat out of trouble,” Levi answers after only a brief hesitation. Mikasa nods, and Levi shakes his head to himself once before he lumbers off toward the house and Erwin has to trot to keep up. 

Erwin’s house smells like a clinic-- like the stink of death and illness has only recently been cleaned away so that some small part of it still lingers under the tang of vinegar and lemon. 

“You go, pack whatever you need,” Levi tells Erwin. “I’ll go to the library.” 

Erwin shakes his head without meaning too. His house doesn't feel like it belongs to him anymore. It is eerily quiet, and dark, and things have been moved. A decorative vase that has sat on a console table in the entrance hallway since Erwin’s father was a boy has been moved to the opposite corner of the table. A painting is missing. All the flowers are dead. 

“What?”

“Should we really… split up?”

Levi considers him for a moment. “No. Library first.” And they both move up the stairs. 

Erwin’s library has been ransacked. He looks at the toppled piles of books, the torn parchment, the spilled ink, in utter distress while Levi curses. 

His notes are missing. His journals. The single page of parchment where he had absently traced Levi’s name over and _over_ and _over again_ as he researched. 

The book is under his desk, hidden beneath of pile of stained parchment. 

“Levi.” 

Levi sighs audibly when Erwin lifts it. 

“They took my notes, but I don’t see any books missing,” Erwin says uncertainly, staring around. 

“Impressive collection,” Levi mutters. “We should take everything we can.” And then he pauses, head suddenly turning toward the window. Then he says, “Are you sure?” He is not speaking to Erwin.

“What is it?” Erwin asks immediately. 

Levi’s whole body has gone tight. Without speaking he grabs Erwin by the wrist, and then tugs open the only other door in the room-- a coat closet where Erwin has stored his father’s old collection of less-than-unique books. Levi shoves Erwin in, and steps in after him. 

“Don’t move. Don’t speak. Don’t even breathe,” he hisses as he pulls the door shut. And before Erwin can ask him whats wrong, he’s stepping into Erwin’s space, pressing Erwin’s back into a stack of cheap novels, and standing so close his ear is almost on Erwin’s chest. Erwin watches him do something with his hand, and very briefly, something like a gold net shimmers around them before it disappears. 

They stand there for what feels like a very long time, Erwin’s careful breathing the only sound he can hear. They stand there for so long, Erwin is sure it was a false alarm, but he still doesn’t speak. He becomes aware, in stages as his fear fades, that Levi is standing _very_ close to him. That his hands are on Erwin’s biceps. That he is holding himself _so still._ He is so quiet it makes Erwin dizzy. So many sounds of life that he had taken for granted in other men are simply gone in Levi. When he wants to stand still, he is stiller than stone. When he wants to be quiet, he is so utterly silent, Erwin starts to feel like he’s not there, like Erwin has hallucinated him from the start. 

And then he hears the voices. 

“--and you’re sure?”

“We’ve read his journals. It’s not just… scholarly interest, it’s an obsession.” Erwin wants to curse. That voice belongs to Zeke Jaeger. 

“Fucking sloppy for you to have missed that he’d _already been there.”_

“Our scouts saw no indication and he gave none when I spoke to him.” 

“Did he have anything useful?” The voices are coming down the hallway, echoing through the open door.

“A few promising leads. We’ve been scouring the house for secret caches, but we’ve restricted our reconnaissance to the daytime in case Ackerman has anyone watching the place. He took out a whole team. We have to assume he’ll want this man… protected.” 

Levi’s body is thrumming; Erwin can feel it, can feel how tense he is, and very, _very_ carefully, he curls his arm around Levi’s back. 

It is almost instinctual. Because Levi is… Levi is the closest Erwin thinks Levi can get to being scared. The look on his face as that first voice moves closer and closer-- Erwin wants to hold him, comfort him, _protect him_ , and he doesn’t realize how strange that is until he watches Levi’s brows raise and his eyes get wide at the contact. He doesn’t lift his eyes to Erwin’s face; he keeps staring pointedly at a spot by Erwin’s arm. 

“He’ll never let me in, you know,” the first voice says smugly. “But I’ll take your goddman money all the same.” The two men enter the library and move away from one another. Erwin hears Zeke start to shuffle books around.

“We don’t expect you to gain access to the manor. We want you to examine Smith’s things, this library, tell us if you can… uh… _sense_ anything we should be taking a closer look at.” 

“The whole house stinks like the runt,” the first voice says. “If that’s what you’re wondering.” 

“That is interesting, but expected.”

“So what exactly am I looking for?” 

“We believe… uh… Smith’s _relationship_ with him…” Zeke trails off. 

“What?”

“We’re not sure,” Zeke admits stiffly. “But we have found certain… items that lead us to believe this Smith fellow is a bit… _overly interested_ in your… nephew.”

Erwin drops his hand from Levi’s waist, his heart suddenly _racing_ in his chest. Levi’s eyes fall to the floor. 

The first voice scoffs. “Fuck’s that supposed to mean?” 

There is the shuffling of papers, and then a whistle. “That’s just fucking unnerving.” 

(Levi glances up at Erwin suspiciously. Erwin blushes and peers stoically over his head.)

“I agree,” Zeke says stiffly. “Is there a chance Levi has, uh, bewitched him?”

“Not really his style,” the first voice replies. 

“Well, have a look around.” 

Both men fall silent and Erwin hears one of them shuffling around the room. After a seemingly _endless_ stretch of time, he hears, “I’m not seeing shit. He’s been in this room though. And recently.” 

“How recently?” 

“I dunno, no more than a few weeks. Maybe sooner. Kinda hard to tell with him. He stinks like magic and it makes everything get a little wiggly.” 

“...Wiggly,” Zeke replies almost scathingly. 

“Yeah, wiggly.” 

“Well… at least take a look at the rest of the house,” Zeke answers finally. 

They move out of the room, down the hall, and Erwin can’t hear them anymore, but Levi is still listening intently. Erwin begins to feel as if he has been standing here for a _very_ long time. He tries to shift a little, to find a more comfortable position to stand in, and Levi shifts closer, closes the distance between them completely and if Erwin wasn’t so undone by the contact, the message would have been clear: _stand still._ But he _is_ undone, entirely, and it makes his head swim and his heart race and Levi’s head tips just a bit to the side and Erwin knows Levi knows what this is doing to him. 

More time passes. Levi doesn’t move away. Erwin’s heart is beating so hard he’s sure Levi can feel it, where they are pressed together at the chest. Or rather, where Levi’s ear is positioned so close to Erwin’s heart, his chest up against Erwin’s belly. He’s not sure how long he can stand this.

When Erwin is sure they _must_ be gone by now, he opens his mouth. “Le--”

Levi’s hand snaps up to cover Erwin’s mouth, and his eyes flash furiously. 

Someone slams into the room. And then there is silence. 

The next person to speak is Zeke. “What--” he begins breathlessly, several moments later. 

“Thought I heard somethin’.” The first speaker has been standing in the doorway, unmoving. Or so Erwin presumes, based on the lack of noise and the position of his voice. 

“A rat?” Zeke suggests a bit wryly. 

The man takes a few uncareful steps into the room. When he speaks again, his voice is so close, Erwin’s heart immediately jumps to a rate that is _painfully_ fast. 

“Somethin’ like that,” the man says almost thoughtfully. 

Erwin doesn’t move, or even dare breathe for a long time after that. When Levi finally lets his hand fall from Erwin’s lips, Erwin feels strangely naked without the touch. Levi steps away from Erwin and glares up at him, arms crossed over his chest and Erwin licks his lips, tries to chase some of the wonderful cold from his hot skin. Levi’s eyes, which had been locked accusingly on Erwin’s face, drop to his chin. 

“I’m sorry.” 

Levi shakes his head once, grunts, and walks out into room. 

“Who. Who was that man?” Erwin asks, voice pitched low. He’s afraid to speak above a whisper. 

“Some motherfucker I used to know,” Levi mutters. “Grab your shit and lets get out of here.” 

Eren meets them in front of the house. “Close call?” he asks when he sees Levi’s face. 

“Fucking heart beats too loud,” Levi mumbles, once again not looking at Erwin. 

“I have a solution for that,” Mikasa offers. 

Erwin cannot tell, based on her dry tone, and the unphased looks on Eren and Levi’s faces, if she is joking or not. 

“How’d ya hide?” Eren asks. He hops down from the driver’s bench and stretches once before he takes Erwin’s bag from his hand and tosses it into the cab. Levi is much gentler with the bag of books he is carrying. 

“Cloaking ward,” Levi answers. They climb into the cab. “Fucker almost broke it by _talking_ though.” 

“You mean a charm,” Erwin corrects curiously. 

Levi furrows his brows. 

“You said ward,” Erwin presses. He’s done enough research to know this much at least. “Wards are pre-cast,” he explains. “And just activated later. Or. Linked to a key of some sort. So you cast a charm, right?”

“No,” Levi says succinctly. 

“But--”

“It was a ward, Erwin.” Erwin stares at him in the dark, brain twisting, and Erwin is _very_ surprised when Levi speaks again. “I cast it when you were unconscious, alright? It’s very basic though-- just hides signs of life. No good if you’re moving around or fucking _talking_.” 

“Why?” Erwin asks, a little stunned. He’s not sure if he’s flattered or angry. That Levi would do such a thing without Erwin’s permission… but it had been a source of protection.

“Uh.” Levi’s eyes cast around the cab, and then land on Erwin’s right knee. “You had a fever. It was, uh. Your heart beat.” He stops. “It was loud. Fast.” 

Erwin is certain if Levi could blush his cheeks would be brilliant pink right now, but he’s not entirely sure why. It seems perfectly in line with what Erwin knows about him-- that he would be annoyed to action by the pounding of Erwin’s heart. Why does he look more uncomfortable than Erwin has ever seen him?

“Why didn’t he find us?” Erwin asks after the silence begins to feel too tight. 

“We got lucky,” Levi answers. “Your library smells like you, so once I activated the ward it… it was like you hadn’t been there for a while. And I’m just hard to find,” he adds. 

Erwin stares at Levi in silence, at the way he turns his head and peers out of the little slit between the curtains, at the quiet, deadly way he holds himself, and thinks of how Levi had pressed against him, of Levi’s hands over his lips and Levi’s chest against his. 

Levi turns his head, meets Erwin’s eye, and Erwin feels himself flush. Levi cannot read his mind. But he can come close. 

“Too loud?” he asks quietly, feeling the rapid pulsing in his chest at the memory rising at the way Levi is looking at him. 

Levi swallows, silent, and once more looks away. 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erwin says, “I’d die for you,” because they are the only words that seem strong enough, even though he knows Levi wouldn’t let him, or ever need him to. 
> 
> Levi pulls away from him, and curses _violently,_ but Erwin doesn’t understand until he hears, “-- _idiot!”_
> 
> Comprehension slams into Erwin like a physical thing and he _sees._ He sees a man who has lived a thousand lifetimes. He sees a man who has watched the world crumble and build itself back up again. And of course, he sees a man who must have seen people die. People he cared about. People he was foolish enough to love. 
> 
> Levi sleeps for days at a time. Levi wears clothes fifty years out of style. Levi has lived so long time has ceased to maintain any meaning. 
> 
> Erwin is a fruit fly. 
> 
> He was born, will live, will die, will have his entire existence in what must, to Levi, feel like a single breath. 
> 
> Levi is breathless (or at least he appears to be) and he hisses, “You thinkI need you to _die?”_
> 
> [...]
> 
> Erwin says, “Then I’ll live for you.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no proper excuse for myself, honestly. Blame BNHA it's not my FAULT. 
> 
> It is, I'm the worst. 
> 
> Hopefully this chapter will make up for the lack of updates? 
> 
> Also-- I can't remember if I've said this anywhere, but there is a very good, in fact probably chance that I have fucked up the Latin in this chapter and in all subsequent chapters so. Don't judge me. But feel free to correct me if you happen to notice.
> 
> I LOVE YOU ALL thank you for bearing with me and the fits and starts this fic has gone through. <3

By the time they reach the house, Erwin feels like he’s burning alive. 

Levi wordlessly climbs from the carriage, grabs Erwin’s books and waltzes inside like nothing has changed, like he hadn’t pressed his whole body to Erwin’s chest and his hand to Erwin’s mouth, like Erwin can _keep living_ like this, and he _can’t do it_ anymore, he can’t. 

“Levi.” 

Levi grunts, starts climbing the stairs. Erwin follows him, barely knows how he got inside, or if anyone else grabbed the other bag. 

“Levi,” he hisses again. 

“Stop it,” Levi mumbles under his breath, sharp and cold and painfully clear for all it was whispered. 

Erwin doesn’t stop. Erwin follows him to the third floor and keeps going when Levi drops the bag of books by Erwin’s door and heads straight for his own room. 

“Look at me.” 

“I know what you look like,” Levi scoffs. He doesn’t even flinch. 

“ _Look at me,”_ Erwin growls. And he grabs Levi by the arm. 

The world seems to slow the moment he does it. He realizes he is standing in a dark, narrow stairwell. He realizes he has to hunch his head to keep from hitting it on the ceiling, and curl his shoulders to fit in the small space. He realizes he has put his hands on a man who could break him like a dry twig, if he wanted to. 

Erwin wants him to. 

Levi turns slowly, peers up at Erwin with his impossibly gray eyes, and Erwin is doing that thing again that only Levi can make him do: speaking without thinking. Speaking _what_ he’s thinking with no regard for how it sounds or what it means that he has to say it. 

“Just… look at me.” 

“I know what you look like,” Levi repeats quietly. And then his eyes slide away, to the shadows by Erwin’s side and Erwin can’t help but take a step closer. 

Levi breathes out; Erwin watches it, notices it because it is the soft, careful breath of a man who is hiding the way his heart is racing. Except Levi doesn’t have a heart. Or at least one that beats. 

“Levi,” he begins, unable to help the way he savors the name against his tongue. “I--”

And then someone yells. 

Levi looks up, glazed eyes clearing and Erwin realizes he doesn’t know what’s happening, he hasn’t been listening, Erwin _distracted_ him--

“Levi!” 

It’s Hanji. Their voice is controlled, but urgent, and Levi pushes past Erwin and dashes at a mostly human rate down the stairs. Erwin follows. 

He can hear many people shouting, and above all of it, he hears Hanji say, “When was the last time she drank?” 

An unfamiliar male voice, soft and a little anxious, answers, “I--I don’t know. She refused, she didn’t want to hurt anybody--”

Erwin comes down the stairs and sees Levi standing to the side, surveying the scene. 

Hanji has their hands on the shoulders of a thin blonde woman, who’s frantic eyes are jolting furiously around the room. A tall, dark haired man and a broad blond one are both watching her anxiously (as are several of the house’s usual denizens) but everyone but Hanji is keeping their distance. The woman is panting, gasping, hands curling into claws. 

Erwin steps half way down the stair and her bright blue eyes, rolling violently in her head, land on him. 

One minute he is staring at Hanji holding her gently, soothingly. The next, Erwin’s heart is in his throat because she is _inches_ from him, lunging for him, teeth bared in a horrible snarl, and a predator’s scream in her throat, and she’d moved _so fast--_

Before Erwin’s can _think_ she is yanked away from him and he feels his heart plummet into his guts. 

She is on the ground. Levi’s hand around her throat, his knee pressed into the spot where her ribs meet, and he--

He is _furious, livid--_ Inhuman. There is a wild, animal intensity in his eyes, curling his lips, and he _hisses_ like an angry lion, like a monster, while the girl claws at his face, his hands, his chest. 

At the sound Levi makes, she falls silent, still, blue eyes roving. She reminds Erwin of a dog, brought to its back by an alpha, unwilling to look the other beast in eye.

No one moves. Shock is tangible and Erwin cannot believe, cannot stand the way Levi is looking at her, like he would tear out her throat if she moved a centimeter. His free hand is raised, ready to pummel her into the hardwood floor and Erwin knows he would do it in a second, without another thought. That it would be _easy._

Hanji says, _very_ gently, “Levi.” 

Levi doesn’t move. He doesn’t blink. He just tightens the hand on her throat and _growls_ again, low in his chest. 

“She didn’t mean it,” Hanji says softly. No one else is moving. The two men who Erwin assumes came in with the woman are staring at Levi with a mix of terror and fury. “She’s out of her mind. She needs to drink.” 

Levi’s chest rises and falls like he’s been running. 

Erwin tries. “Levi.” 

Everyone is looking at him. He swallows when he realizes, when the collective weight of an entire room’s attention falls on him.

Levi lets her go, uncurls his hand like it had been stuck like that and without looking away from her face, he hisses, “Get upstairs, _now.”_

For once, Erwin doesn’t argue. 

He goes to his room and sits on the bed with the door open and doesn’t know how to think. All he can see is Levi, lips curled in a furious snarl, hands just the tiniest twitch of pressure away from literally tearing that woman’s head off. 

Erwin swallows, thick and painful in the dark. He knows Levi well enough by now to know he does not lose control. He knows Levi well enough to know that he just had, that Erwin had witnessed him crack, had seen the animal that lived inside. Erwin had watched him kill before-- the man who murdered one of Levi’s people, _all_ the assassins from Erwin’s house. But Levi had been cold then, chillingly calculated. 

Not like what Erwin had just seen. 

He replays the scene in his head over and over again, can’t unsee the way everyone had looked between Erwin and Levi, the shock on their faces. He feels cold. 

“Erwin.” Hanji knocks on the door even though it is open and Erwin jumps so hard the bed creaks. “Can I come in?” 

“Y-yes,” Erwin croaks. His voice doesn’t want to work. 

Levi is behind them. He doesn’t look at Erwin; he only looks at Hanji’s back, and he paces like a caged beast. 

Hanji sits on the bed, uncharacteristically gentle. “I need to ask you to do something.” 

Erwin blinks at them, tries not to see Levi behind them. “Go on.” 

“That girl down there--”

“What’s wrong with her?” Erwin interrupts. Because _something_ had been wrong. He knows she is one of _them_ but she is different, wild, frightening in a way Erwin isn’t used to. 

“She’s… she’s very young, but also very strong,” Hanji says. “And sometimes, if they don’t have a… a teacher when they... change, and they’re very strong-willed, sometimes people like us…” Hanji trails off and looks at a space above the baseboard on the wall across from the bed. “She hasn’t taken care of herself.” 

_She didn’t want to hurt anyone,_ Erwin recalls, thinking of the voices he had heard. 

“She’s dangerous,” Hanji goes on. “Out of her mind. She’s… starving to death.” 

Erwin looks at them sharply. The woman had been strong, fast. Not starved. 

Hanji seems to read his mind. “It takes years for that to happen. In the meantime… you just lose your mind.” 

Erwin understands then, why Hanji is here. He still says, “What do you need from me?”

“ _Nothing,”_ Levi interrupts, deep voice like a struck wire pulled too taut. “She’ll be _fine_ until tomorrow.” 

“We don’t have any other… people like you in the house right now. We closed down for the evening when Levi left.” 

“People like me,” Erwin says wryly to hide the way his mouth has gone dry. “You mean people with a pulse.” 

“Yes.” 

“ _No,”_ Levi hisses. “I said ‘ _No,’_ Hanji--”

Hanji overrides him. “You don’t have to do anything. She’ll live until morning. But--”

“I’ll do it,” Erwin interrupts. He’s not sure why. Maybe because her friends had looked so scared for her. Maybe because under the wild, crazed look in her eyes, she’d looked… sad and terrified and beautiful. Maybe because Levi didn’t want him to and he wanted to know why. “What do I have to do?”

“Erwin,” Levi says firmly. He stops his pacing. He looks Erwin in the eye; he does that so rarely it always makes Erwin dizzy. “You don’t have to do anything, you don’t--”

“I want to help.” 

Hanji nods and says, “I’ll get the supplies.”

“Upstairs,” Levi answers. His eyes flash when he looks at Erwin. “Do it there.” And then he turns and stalks out, body tight and… anxious. It shocks Erwin to see it. 

Hanji pats him once on the shoulder and smiles. “I’ll meet you up there.”

“You don’t need me to--”

“No. We can’t risk having you in the same room as her at the moment.” 

Erwin nods. 

The stairwell to the attic feels too tight again. Erwin’s heart is flying and he thinks it’s been weeks since he hasn’t felt it kick into a near-panic at least once a day. Just from the way Levi looks at him, on the rare occasions that he does. He thinks of what his life has become, what he’s just agreed to do, and an air of unreality takes hold of him, so powerful he has to look at the cracks in the plaster walls to reassure himself this is not a dream. His dreams, though vivid, had never been quite so detailed in that way, unless he was looking at the black cracks in Levi’s mercury eyes. 

When he opens the door, Levi is still pacing. He looks at Erwin and motions to the table and chairs and Erwin sits down. The air between them feels thick, viscous. Erwin hates feeling so close to him and yet still unable to reach him. 

Erwin wants to ask him about what happened downstairs, but he can’t bring himself to. Something of the cracked Levi is still there-- like Erwin can still see his fangs. 

Hanji returns quickly, with a bowl and a small, glinting knife. 

“We won’t take much,” Hanji tells him soothingly. “Just enough to hopefully bring Annie back to her senses.” 

“Annie,” Erwin repeats. Giving her a name makes her feel more human than the ravenous monster Erwin has just seen. 

“Her friends brought her,” Hanji says, voice steady and casual. They sit across from Erwin at the table. They put their hand out and Erwin isn’t sure what they want; it takes him a moment to lift his hand and put it, palm up, in theirs. “They’re called Reiner and Bertolt, they said. Someone in town told them about us. They’re new.” 

They wipe the thin blue skin on Erwin’s wrist with liquor. 

“Only turned a few months ago, it sounds like. They managed to get by, but Annie... She refused to eat. Thought she could fight it.” 

They lay the blade against Erwin’s skin and he is startled by how easy it is, by the line of blood that bubbles up, red and brilliant, even in Levi’s dim room. It doesn’t hurt until it does. 

Hanji has cut the vein, has drawn the blade vertically down his arm and it startles him as he watches. It comes fast. They tilt Erwin’s hand over the bowl and it fills _so quickly._

He is light-headed. He swallows. The bowl is going to overflow. 

“Levi.”

Hanji speaks and Erwin finally looks up. Levi is standing very, very still, staring at them. Erwin realizes he hasn’t moved since Hanji cut Erwin’s skin. His eyes are so focused, Erwin takes a moment to really look at him, knows he won’t notice. 

Then Levi shakes himself like he’s waking from a dream, and crosses to his shelf-- the one with the books and the crystals and the mortar and pestle. He moves very quickly. It feels like only seconds have passed before he is pressing a thick, fragrant paste to Erwin’s wrist. It stings and Erwin clenches. 

Hanji collects their bowl. “Thank you, Erwin.” And they leave. 

“Don’t tense like that,” Levi says quietly. Erwin forces his arm to relax. “Are you alright?”

“Fine.” When Levi stares at him, he admits, “A little dizzy.” 

Levi nods and says, “I’ll have Sasha bring you something sweet to eat.” 

“Sweet?” Erwin can’t help but ask with a smile. Levi is winding a soft white wrap tightly around his wrist. He feels better, for Levi’s hands on him. 

“It’ll make you feel better,” Levi mutters. 

“I’m fine now,” Erwin tells him. Levi looks up at him. Erwin realizes dizzily that Levi has not taken Hanji’s seat. He is kneeling on the floor between Erwin’s knees, wrapping Erwin’s wrist where Erwin had pulled it into his lap after Hanji left. 

When Erwin peers down at him, his brows furrow. He looks down at Erwin’s wrist, and stands quickly without releasing Erwin’s hand. “You should--” He clears his throat. “Hold this above your heart until the bleeding stops. Or. Or lay down. You could. Lay down.” 

“What happened down there?”

“She was dangerous,” Levi grits out. “She was going to kill you.” 

Erwin shakes his head. “No, she wasn’t.” 

“Yes--”

“Not with you there.” 

Levi goes still. He is still holding Erwin’s arm, and Erwin lays his fist below his shoulder, and above his heart. Levi still doesn’t let go. He leans in. He’s staring at Erwin’s face, his lips, like he can’t tear himself away. 

Erwin makes up his mind more quickly than any single thought he has had since Levi came into his life. He adjusts his injured arm, the one Levi is holding, so he can wrap his fingers around Levi’s terribly thin wrist. His grip is weak. It hurts to curl his hand like this. He knows Levi could pull away, but he doesn’t. 

And he pulls. 

Pulls Levi to his chest, pulls Levi forward so he can thread the fingers of his free hand into Levi’s impossibly soft hair, pulls so Levi has to take a step forward or fall, or tear away from him. 

Levi steps forward. 

He’s so small, Erwin only has to tilt his head up a little. Only has to crane forward a little. 

And when they kiss, Erwin is sure the earth is shattering apart, that the floor will break, that his skin cannot contain the fire in his chest. He tries to get enough in one instant, knows, he _knows,_ that Levi will allow no more than that, that he will pull away, that he will tell Erwin to go to bed. 

Except he doesn’t. 

He _doesn’t._

When Erwin realizes Levi is kissing him back, that his lips have parted, that he’s-- that he’s got his hand on Erwin’s _chest,_ that he’s holding a fistful of Erwin’s shirt so neither of them can pull away, he makes a low, involuntary sound deep in his chest. It is the sound of the shiver that runs from the tips of his toes to the top of his head. It is the sound of the chill prickling his skin, in unfathomable opposition to the heat in his chest. It is the sound of his own heart breaking. 

Levi breaks first, leans back just enough, and says, “Er--”

“No,” Erwin cuts him off breathlessly, cranes forward searching for Levi’s lips without opening his eyes. Kissing has never felt like this, like coming home. 

Levi hisses, “You _ridiculous, stubborn_ man,” and Erwin has to open his eyes. 

All the cracks are showing again, but they’re not like they were before. They make Erwin think of broken pottery, squeezed back together with new fault lines. 

And Erwin knows he doesn’t understand anything. He never has. He probably never will. 

It scares him how much he needs this. It scares him how _good_ it feels to kiss Levi and it’s never, never been like this before. Kissing is fun, it’s a little mindless, it _feels good,_ but this-- Erwin _needs_ this, feels like he will break apart without it and he wants to hate Levi for depriving him of it for so long, for denying it now when Erwin _knows_ in the pit of his stomach that Levi feels it too. 

“Tell me you did this,” he insists, the words surprising him as they leave his mouth. “You made me want you.” 

Levi’s eyes squeeze closed briefly and then flick back open. Erwin tightens the hold he still has on Levi’s wrist (it _hurts)_ and says, “Made me need you.” He feels reckless and stupid. He can’t believe he has been so blunt, that he’s made it all painfully plain. 

“I couldn’t do that if I tried,” Levi answers. “And I wouldn’t if I could.”

Erwin is through with lying to himself. Erwin is through with fighting, with pretending, with keeping this precariously thin screen between them, where Erwin pretends he isn’t looking and Levi pretends he hasn’t noticed. 

Erwin says, “I’d die for you,” because they are the only words that seem strong enough, even though he knows Levi wouldn’t let him, or ever need him to. 

Levi pulls away from him, and curses _violently,_ but Erwin doesn’t understand until he hears, “-- _idiot!”_

Comprehension slams into Erwin like a physical thing and he _sees._ He sees a man who has lived a thousand lifetimes. He sees a man who has watched the world crumble and build itself back up again. And of course, he sees a man who must have seen people die. People he cared about. People he was foolish enough to love. 

Levi sleeps for days at a time. Levi wears clothes fifty years out of style. Levi has lived so long time has ceased to maintain any meaning. 

Erwin is a fruit fly. 

He was born, will live, will die, will have his entire existence in what must, to Levi, feel like a single breath. 

Levi is breathless (or at least he appears to be) and he hisses, “You thinkI need you to _die?”_

His voice is different. Heavily accented, and he curses again. When next he speaks, he weaves languages together, and Erwin only half understands. “-- _fool--like paper, weak and thin--fucking stupid--”_

Erwin feels himself smile and Levi falters. “Is--funny?” he demands. 

“You’re not speaking English,” Erwin tells him. “If you’re insulting me, I can’t understand you.” 

Levi levels a string of expletives at him then, his face cold with fury, and Erwin starts to laugh without meaning to. 

Levi trails off and looks at him with a strange, confused expression on his face. 

Erwin says, “Then I’ll live for you.” 

Levi scoffs. “A handful of years before you’re goddamn useless and a handful more after that.”

Erwin stands. Levi doesn’t back away from him and Erwin slides his hand, easy and familiar, against Levi’s temple. He watches those silver eyes go soft and liquid, and for the first time since meeting Levi he doesn’t feel like a young boy staring in awe at a god. “Then I shall make each one count.” 

“It won’t matter,” Levi insists. He shakes his head, but it only serves to press Erwin’s hand more firmly against him. 

“It matters,” Erwin tells him. 

“You’ll ask me to do something I can’t do,” Levi says, taking a step away when Erwin leans down to kiss him again. 

“I won’t ask you to do that.” 

Levi stares at him. 

“No, I think you like me too much.” Erwin smiles when Levi’s eyes crack again. “You wouldn’t condemn me to your hell.” 

And Levi shatters. Erwin feels it happen. He buries both his hands in Erwin’s shirt and presses his whole face to Erwin’s chest and he feels so small and fragile and somehow, impossibly, not nearly so ageless. Erwin hears him whisper, “ _Fuck_ you,” into the fabric of his shirt and Erwin has only just curled his hand around the back of Levi’s head when he feels Levi’s full weight-- bigger, more solid than he expects-- around his neck, feels Levi haul himself effortlessly up so their faces are level, feels Levi’s _legs_ wrap around his _waist_ and he’s dizzy again because no matter how many times he thought of this, it was never this good, and never this real. 

“Promise me,” Levi begs against his lips. “Erwin, promise me you’ll never ask me that.” 

“I promise.” It is easy to say, even if he feels as if he has committed to something huge and monstrous, something he doesn’t fully understand. 

“ _Swear it.”_

“I swear.” 

Levi buries his hands in Erwin’s hair. With more grace than Erwin can fathom, he shimmies higher around Erwin’s chest, so he’s bending his neck to meet Erwin’s lips, so Erwin has his arms curled around Levi’s waist and all his weight is settled comfortable and solid in a way that doesn’t make Erwin strain. 

He climbs onto Levi’s bed, one knee at a time, without letting Levi go. With the way Levi is kissing him, he’s not sure Levi even notices. 

The headboard thumps against the wall when Erwin puts Levi’s back to it and only then does Levi pull away with a disbelieving sort of gasp and peer around like he’s forgotten where he is. 

Erwin puts his lips to the place where Levi’s neck and shoulder meet and he feels Levi’s whole body go tight before Levi melts in his hands. 

Erwin feels giddy, fizzy, like he’s floating and he’s kissing Levi’s neck artlessly, basking in his cool skin and the way he smells. Now that Levi is letting Erwin touch him, he never wants to let him go. 

Levi makes a sweet, confused little sound, and Erwin pulls away so he can look at him, so he can revel in how stunning every inch of his face is, how much Erwin loves it. 

His vision narrows. The room tilts. 

Levi curses. His voice is low and husky when he speaks. “You need food.”

“I’m fine,” Erwin insists once his head has cleared. He leans forward again, but Levi stops him, his lips drawing up just the tiniest bit. 

And he says, “Lie down at least. And lift your arm, it’s still bleeding.” 

“How can you--” Levi just looks at him. “Right.” Erwin glances at the white bandage and sees a faint pink line appearing there. So he crashes forward, sprawls boneless across Levi’s bed and has never been so content to lay amongst linens before. Because Levi doesn’t move away from him. He shifts only a little, so his legs are pressed up against Erwin’s side. When Erwin looks up at him, smiles, happy and careless and living only in this moment, Levi smiles back at him. Erwin pretends the shadows in his eyes are just a little smaller than they usually are.

It’s like watching the sun come out-- or the moon, Erwin amends. Levi’s eyes are still dark, hesitant, but hungry too. And his lips, the startled, fleeting joy that seems to have taken hold of him, make Erwin’s chest hurt. He thinks he understands now. Understands that Levi feels things he hopes no one will know he feels, feels things he wishes he didn’t have to. Erwin understands that every time Levi looks at him, the shadow in his eyes is sadness, that Erwin’s mortality is something he can never fully ignore no matter how hard he tries not to think of it. 

“Like this,” Levi tells him. He shifts his weight, presses at Erwin’s shoulder so Erwin rolls onto his back. He spends a few seconds arranging the pillows, fastidious and thoughtful, and then takes Erwin’s hand gently in his, presses it to the pillows he has arranged above Erwin’s head. “Don’t move,” he commands. “At least for a little while.” 

Erwin obeys, but only one arm is injured. He curls his free arm around Levi’s waist and tugs him over, uses all the muscles in his shoulder so Levi either has to follow him, or fight him off. Levi huffs a little laugh and climbs onto Erwin’s lap, settles his knees on either side of Erwin’s waist and Erwin tells him, “I’m not done with you.” 

“You’re so strong for a human,” Levi answers absently, tracing his fingers along Erwin’s forearm. Erwin grips him by the waist now, resists the urge to draw his other hand down and pull Levi forward. 

“Don’t flatter me,” Erwin tells him. 

Levi rolls his eyes and looks away, so Erwin, quick and deft, slides his hand under Levi’s shirt so he can feel all the corded muscle under Levi’s ribs. Levi’s eyes snap back to Erwin’s face and Erwin sees his lips part, sees him swallow a little gasp. 

Erwin says, “I’m not done with you.” 

“Bastard.” 

Erwin grins at him and pulls his hand away from Levi’s side just so he can pull Levi down to him by his shirt front. 

They are kissing again. It’s hard with only one hand-- Erwin wants to bury both hands in Levi’s hair, wants to tear Levi’s shirt off, wants to hold him _so tightly_ but he can’t. He has to let Levi lead. 

It is not something he is used to, in this place, but it feels more natural with Levi than he thinks it has any right to. He has to wait for Levi to nose under his ear, to slide his hands under Erwin’s shirt, to kiss down over his chest, to--

“ _Fuck.”_ It comes out sharp and shivery, practualy stutters out of him and he arches into Levi’s hips when he feels Levi’s lips puckering around his nipple. He’s pulled Erwin’s shirt down low, has managed to unbutton the collar without Erwin realizing. His lips are cold, his soft, swirling tongue is cold, but it feels _dirty_ somehow, how much Erwin likes the chill against his hot skin. He may be cold, but Levi is soft too, and solid, and gentle, and Erwin knows his heart doesn’t beat but it doesn’t change how _alive_ Levi feels. How real. 

Levi stills, and Erwin’s heat skips. Very carefully, very _gently,_ Levi pinches Erwin’s skin between his teeth. He releases almost immediately, but it is enough, because no matter how gentle he is, Erwin feels the threat. Levi’s teeth are a deadly weapon and feeling them pull over Erwin’s thin skin is like holding his hand over a candle flame and daring it not to burn. 

It undoes him. He _shakes_ like he is suddenly freezing, groans so his chest vibrates with it and he realizes how far gone he really is. Levi has been kissing him _so sweetly_ and some small part of him had clinged to sanity. That part is gone now and Erwin _needs_ him, craves him like water. 

His voice doesn’t sound like his. It’s wild, uncontrolled, thoughtless. “ _Harder.”_

Levi groans softly against Erwin’s skin and Erwin hears the complaint in it, the hesitation. “I--”

“Please, _please, do it again.”_

Levi hisses in frustration, exasperation, but then Erwin feels _all of him,_ feels Levi holding him down, feels all the coiled power in every inch of his body, feels his teeth close mercilessly over Erwin’s skin, feels that any more pressure will draw blood and knows Levi has been meticulously careful not to. 

The sound Erwin makes embarasses him. He has the sudden, uncharacteristic urge to cover his face with a pillow so Levi can’t see him, so those sounds will be muffled. His whole body throbs. He can feel a tiny wet spot in his trousers growing and he hates the way they hold him down. 

Levi pulls back and Erwin almost follows him up until he realizes Levi is pushing Erwin’s shirt up over his head, pulling it off, tossing it aside. He bites his lip and spreads his hands across Erwin’s chest when he’s through and Erwin blinks dizzily at him, still aware enough to feel a little smug at the look on Levi’s face. 

He lifts his hand to cup Levi’s cheek, but before he can reach, faster than he could possibly hope to counter, Levi has pinned both hands above his head. 

It is like being shackled beneath a stone; Erwin has no hope of making him budge. But any thoughts of trying to reclaim the use of his hands are obliterated by the realization that the movement has brought Levi's face inches from Erwin’s. Erwin is embarrassed again, because Levi kisses him _hard_ and Erwin’s eyes roll back in his head, because he goes limp and boneless at the way Levi holds him, because he wants--

No. He doesn't _want that._

Levi bites Erwin’s lip and the delicious burst of pain is just a little too sharp. Erwin jerks and hisses and he feels the way Levi pulls himself back, feels what a struggle it is.

“Shit, shit, sorry--”

Erwin runs his tongue along his lip and tastes blood. He grins, feels utterly depraved in the most addicting way when he cranes up with just his head and his chest, arms still pinned above his head. Levi's fists tighten around Erwin’s wrists when he sucks Erwin’s bottom lip, gentle, between his teeth. Erwin shivers when he feels Levi's tongue trace his skin there, and he doesn't bother hiding it. Levi could suck him dry and Erwin would probably thank him for it. 

Levi lingers like that for longer than Erwin expects him to, kissing his lips and his jaw and his neck. The first time Erwin feels Levi kiss the skin he had scarred with his teeth, Erwin’s mind whites out. He spent so long with no knowledge of Levi except that night, with nothing concrete to remember except the way his lips and tongue and teeth had felt against this exact spot so that feeling it again is like realizing all his most secret fantasies in an instant. 

He only comes back to himself when he hears Levi; the sound he makes is something like a laugh, but dark with some secret amusement. Erwin realizes he turned his head, lifted his chin, bared himself to Levi’s kiss, and that he moaned _loudly_ while doing it. 

Levi kisses him again and he can’t spare enough thought to be embarrassed. 

“I didn’t take you for a loud one.” Levi draws back enough to look Erwin in the eye with that wry, deadpan expression that only he seems capable of wearing. 

“It’s not me, it’s _you,”_ Erwin accuses thoughtlessly. 

Levi’s expression gets, impossibly, flater. “I’ve known whores quieter than you.” 

“No,” Erwin huffs, squirming. “It’s not--”

Levi cuts him off, suddenly cheerful and amused. “Oh. You mean you _usually_ are.” 

“Bastard,” Erwin counters, half laughing when Levi nips at his earlobe. 

“I’m rubbing off on you. What else do you _usually_ do?” 

“I’m usually stronger,” Erwin tells him, straining against Levi’s hands to underscore his point. When Levi just smirks at him, catlike, Erwin lifts his hips and twists. Levi is stronger but Erwin is still bigger, and Levi is sitting high on his chest, too short to scoot lower and still maintain his grip on Erwin’s wrists. When his seat suddenly shifts, he pulls back his hands to catch himself, and Erwin rolls on top, smug that his little trick worked. “I’m always bigger.” 

Levi hums, lifts his head to meet Erwin, and Erwin buries both hands _finally_ in Levi’s hair. 

“Careful,” Levi warns when he does it, but Erwin’s fingers are loose and gentle, and Levi relaxes into the touch. He runs his hands down Erwin’s spine; Erwin is too focused on the way their lips are touching to really comprehend. It isn’t until Levi twists himself enough to reach low, to slide his hand into Erwin’s trousers, middle finger pressing toward a _very_ private area, that Erwin takes any notice at all. He gasps, and jerks away, and Levi’s brows shoot up; he pulls his hand away. 

Erwin puts his head on the mattress above Levi’s shoulder, breathing hard, and can’t pluck any singular thought from his head. He feels young and foolish in Levi’s arms, suddenly glaringly inexperienced and painfully anxious. 

“Unusual?” Levi asks carefully. 

Erwin bites the tip of his own tongue and nods without lifting his head. 

“Bad?” 

Erwin shakes his head instantly. He can’t imagine not wanting Levi’s hands, no matter how Levi wants to use them. But it doesn’t change the fact that he’s never done _that_ before, or that most of the people he’s been with have been whores and as far as Erwin is concerned you don’t let a whore fuck you. 

The thought tickles uncomfortably the moment it crosses his mind; the last time he’d thought it, the last time he’d paid for sex, he hadn’t known any actual whores personally. What went on the cellar wasn’t exactly typical of a brothel, but it didn’t change the fact that Erwin had been living inside one, that when he was threatened, he’d taken refuge in a whorehouse. 

That the man for whom he’d tear the world apart had introduced himself as just that. 

_What are you?_ Erwin had said. 

_A whore,_ Levi had told him. 

Levi’s hand comes back, careful and gentle, but Erwin is tense, holding his breath when Levi tries to touch him again. 

Levi pulls his hand away and cups Erwin’s ass over his trousers instead. “Has anyone ever…”

Erwin shakes his head. 

“ _Never?”_

“No, alright? They always wanted me to--”

“Do you want me to--”

_“Yes.”_

Erwin doesn’t know how he is going to answer that question until the word comes out. The second it leaves his lips he flushes deeply, can feel it in his toes. It feels… wrong isn’t the right word, but certainly not typical. Erwin is used to men going boneless and pliant in his arms, used to men who not only let him lead, but expect him to. Maybe it’s his status, or his size, or the way he carries himself, but he’s never had a man who pushes back. In all his dreams of Levi, Levi is just the same, swooning into Erwin like he _needs_ him. 

Erwin feels foolish for not realizing between the two of them, he is the one far more likely to swoon. 

Levi scoots sideways and Erwin lifts off him. He keeps his face pressed the pillow for a moment, sure he cannot bear to look at Levi right now, and sure his face must be bright red. Levi scratches his fingers over Erwin’s shoulders, a thoughtful little hum on his lips, and then says, “Stay like that.” 

Erwin almost turns over just to be contrary. But then he’d have to let Levi _see_ him and he can’t stand that right now. Instead he tries to calm his heart-- it’s beating painfully against his ribs. He almost feels like it’s going to break from his chest. 

He feels Levi lean away from him, hears the drawer in the end table open, but before he can lift his head to look, Levi is plucking at his trousers and telling him, “Take these off.” 

Erwin uses one hand to push them off and still doesn’t take his face out of the pillow. 

Levi laughs at him. “What, now you’re fucking shy? You’ve been eye-fucking me since we met.” 

“ _Have not,”_ Erwin lies, lifting his head indignantly. 

“And making me translate all those dirty words,” Levi tells him smugly. 

“I didn’t know they were dirty--”

Levi lifts his brows. “You made me translate ‘dripping come-hole’ twice.” 

Erwin’s cheeks are on fire. He puts his face in the pillow again and his voice is muffled when he says, “ _You_ gave me the poem book.” 

“I like the way your skin looks when you blush.” Levi says it like it’s fact. He isn’t teasing or trying to make Erwin blush harder. His voice is as dry and flat as it ever is and Erwin groans into his pillow in sudden, nearly nameless frustration. 

Levi chuckles and then runs his hand over the curve of Erwin’s bare ass; Erwin has never felt so exposed in his life and he shivers at the chill in Levi's skin. Levi repositions himself, crawls over Erwin’s leg and settles between them. Erwin is breathing so hard it's making him dizzy and he can't believe what he's agreed to. Being with Levi--like this-- skin to skin and lips to neck--it's already nearly too much to bear and now this, this impossible thing Erwin has never thought to let anybody do to him-- 

_I want Levi to fuck me_. He says the words to himself to test them, to ensure they are true, to see how they feel in his head. And when Hell doesn't open up and swallow him, he tries, _I want his fingers inside me. I want him. I want him. I want--_

“Spread your legs a little,” Levi tells him gently. “I want to look at you.” 

Erwin has to squeeze his lips together to keep from groaning, either in embarrassment or delicious arousal, he's not really sure which. Levi says filthy things so easily. Erwin spreads his legs. 

Levi's hand is slick. When he feels Levi's fingers at the base of his spine, he tenses, curls his toes. Levi is patiently teasing, tracing the tips of his fingers between the dips in the lowest part of Erwin’s back and frustratingly lower beyond that. Levi is toying with him. He slides one finger between Erwin’s cheeks and teases some more, runs the full length of him at least three times before Erwin sighs a little and forces himself to relax. Levi's hands _do_ feel good, for all the sensation is incredibly foreign. Levi is spreading oil over Erwin’s skin, and he stops every so often to add more until Erwin can feel it running down his thighs.

He is just beginning to truly relax, to let his shoulders go limp and to stretch his sore arm back over his head (he has been clutching the pillow) when Levi says, “Do you like that?” 

“Yes.” It's a breathy confession, not nearly so confident as he usually is with sexual partners. But then he reminds himself nothing about Levi ever approaches ‘usual.’

“Do you know what I like?” When Erwin doesn't immediately respond, he adds, “Erwin?”

“Hmm?”

Erwin’s absently hummed reply turns into a stuttering choke when he feels Levi's finger press inside him. Levi says smugly, “That.”

Erwin’s whole chest seizes up and he arches his back without meaning to, lifts his face toward the wall and holds his breath and can't decide if he loves this or if he hates it. Levi mumbles in Latin and Erwin is too overwhelmed to realize that he actually understands-- the meaning of the word penetrates before Erwin realizes he hasn't actually spoken English. It's something like ‘tight’ and ‘fuck’ and ‘hole’ all in one and when the appreciative, encouraging tone of Levi's voice reaches his ears, he curls forward into the pillow again, reminds himself to breathe.

Erwin is just getting used to _this_ , to the tight uncertainty in his chest, to the cool slide off Levi's finger, when Levi _does something_ , he presses, he pushes, there is an uncomfortable stretch and then-- 

Erwin feels like someone has doused him with warm water. His toes stretch then curl against the sheets and he goes from total silence to a voice cracking shout instantaneously and he decides he does like this, he likes this _very_ much.

“Oh my-- _fuck--_ ”

Levi does it again. 

“Fuck-- _fuck-- Le--”_

And again. Erwin falls inside his own head, knows nothing but the way Levi is touching him and the way his body feels against the soft linens. It's not until Levi scolds him softly, tells him to breathe, that he realizes the way he's holding every muscle too tightly, the way his lungs are burning. 

He falls against his pillow with a huge gasp and Levi's doing something new with his hand again. Erwin thinks he might be adding another finger but he's too overwhelmed to really know and he can't see what Levi's doing and he's never felt this before and the sensation is so new, so _alarmingly_ good, he can't exactly pinpoint _what's_ happening. Whatever it is, it's good, _Levi_ is good, and Erwin realizes he seems to know exactly how to move and how to press to keep Erwin from getting _too comfortable._ Everytime Erwin settles into a rhythm, Levi changes it. 

“Are you sure you've never done this before?” he hears Levi tease when Erwin arches back on Levi's hand. Erwin shakes his head. “Why not?” 

Erwin can't speak. He can't tell Levi he's never trusted anyone to touch him like this, that he's never been willing to turn his back on a lover before. 

“Do you still want me to…” 

Erwin nods breathlessly, still doesn't fully trust himself to speak. 

“I need you to say it,” Levi whispers, voice low and secret in the dark, shadowy room.

“I. I…”

“Whatever you want, sweetheart.” 

What little breath Erwin has been able to hold onto flees because he's heard Levi say those words in his dreams. Levi is teasing him, can't possibly understand how they effect Erwin. 

Erwin surprises himself when he speaks. He thinks of Catullus. He thinks of his list of dirty words, thinks of asking Levi to speak each one and thinks of the way Levi's voice curls around him when he whispers them like some dark, amusing secret. Erwin picks a phrase in Latin--in _Levi's_ Latin-- and Levi goes utterly still when he says it. 

Then Erwin gasps, sharp and breathy, because Levi has taken a fistful of Erwin’s hair and _pulled_. He leans forward over Erwin’s back, puts his lips to Erwin’s ear and whispers fiercely, “What did you just say to me, _carissimus?”_

Erwin bares his throat to the headboard and feels a little like he's reclaimed something of himself. He says it again, firmly, trying to remember exactly the way Levi had pronounced it but only hearing Levi speak the translation in his head. _Fuck me._

Levi doesn't let go of his hair. He pulls back hard so Erwin has to hold himself up on his forearms, but the position bends Erwin’s back, lets Levi whisper in his ear and he’s weaving languages again-- some Erwin understands, some he doesn’t-- and Erwin realizes how carefully Levi has been holding himself. His deep, rich voice never rises above a gentle whisper, but he speaks so fervently, Erwin finally feels as if Levi wants Erwin just as much as Erwin wants him. 

It’s addictive and Erwin loves it so much he feels like he’s going to choke on it. He starts picking out names-- _carissimus_ and _cor_ and _mea, mea, mea--_ and all he can say back is, “ _Levi.”_

Levi keeps whispering and Erwin feels Levi spread out over his back, touch as much of Erwin as he can. He doesn’t know when Levi took his clothes off, but the feel of Levi’s cool, smooth skin is enough to make Erwin shiver; he hates that he hadn’t watched Levi disrobe. 

And then Erwin feels Levi’s cock pressing against him and his own breath freezes in his throat. 

Levi whispers, “Breathe, _mea cor.”_ He’s amused and concerned at once and Erwin has never quite felt so cared for by a lover before. The fact that he can consider _Levi_ a lover almost makes him forget to breathe again, so instead, he whispers some of the words Levi had translated for him. 

He’s surprised at how easy it is. Despite all his urging, he still goes very still, and very quiet when he finally feels Levi’s cock pressing inside him. But Levi goes slowly and he whispers in Erwin’s ear the whole time and Erwin isn’t sure again, if it’s incredible or awful, because he’s not sure he knows how to process the feeling. Levi doesn’t move at all. 

“Erwin.” 

“ _Yes.”_

Levi smoothes the hair off Erwin’s forehead. Erwin has the wild, impossible, ridiculous thought that he could cry. 

“Is this… how is this?”

Erwin opens his mouth to speak and laughter, short, airy, hysterical, comes out instead of words. 

Levi tries again. “Am I hurting you?” 

“ _No.”_ He doesn’t just say it once. He mumbles it over and over again until Levi laughs at him, low and intimate, and moves, just a little, just enough to make a completely involuntary groan force its way from Erwin’s lips. 

“Good?” 

“ _Fuck--fuck, yes--”_ Erwin’s arms feel heavy. His hands are tingling. Levi’s still pulling his hair. 

“This?” Levi moves again, rolls his hips slow and gentle until Erwin chokes on his own voice and says, “This, this is good?” 

Erwin tells him it is. Erwin gasps his name. Erwin can’t remember his own. 

His pace is _infuriatingly_ slow. He adjusts his hips, adjusts the way he’s holding Erwin so he can control exactly the way they press together, and Erwin feels that delicious warm-water feeling again, like feeling all his muscles unlock, like the soothing press of a thumb between his shoulder blades only _so_ much better, so much deeper, so much _more._

Levi moves his body like a dancer, slick and smooth and perfectly controlled. Erwin can feel the muscles in Levi’s belly when they roll across his back. Erwin is _gasping_ for air, can’t breathe for all the _truly obscene_ sounds he’s making, and Levi isn’t the slightest bit winded. 

He’s not quiet, though. He whispers Erwin’s name. He calls him _cor._

The pace is maddening. Erwin thinks it should be harder, faster, though he’s not totally sure what a more punishing pace would do to him right now. What he does know if that, with the way Levi is holding him and rolling his hips, neither of them is even close to approaching climax. Erwin realizes for the first time that he’s not even hard anymore--the sheets beneath him are embarrassingly wet, but the overwhelming sensation of _being fucked_ and, more, being fucked by _Levi,_ had been too much to think of or consider anything else. 

He’s tired. How long have they been doing this? He feels himself falling limp in Levi’s arms, feels his _voice_ getting tired, cracking, falling into desperate, pleading whispers. When Levi pauses to add even _more_ oil to the place where they’re pressed together, Erwin whimpers his name. 

“Shh, shh, I want this to last,” Levi replies. Erwin can tell by the way he goes quiet after he has spoken that he didn’t mean to say it, or hadn’t known that’s how he felt. 

Erwin hums to himself, presses back on Levi’s cock, and says, “We have time, you know. I don’t have plans tomorrow, do you?” 

“Time,” Levi mumbles. 

“If you want to get me out of your bed, you’re going to have throw me out.” 

Levi simply radiates pleasure. He draws his hand down Erwin’s spine, and then says, “Turn over.” 

Erwin does. He winces when they pull apart, but he’s distracted by the way Levi huffs all of a sudden. “Of-fucking-course.” 

“What?” Erwin demands, sitting up on his elbows. 

Levi rolls his eyes, shoves his hair off his forehead with the hand that’s not covered in oil, and then curls his fingers around Erwin’s really only semi-conscious cock. Erwin falls back on the pillows and yells a single cursed encouragement. Levi says, “This.”

“What about it?” Erwin demands, breathless all over again. 

“Just figures is all. You’re built like a goddamn god, of course you’ve got a fucking cock to match.” 

Warm pleasure curls in Erwin’s chest. “A god?”

Levi grins at him, a little vicious, and starts to fuck him again. He strokes Erwin with his hand at the same time, and for the first time in _however long_ they’ve been here, Erwin falls utterly silent. 

Some confused, horrible aroused feeling swimming in his head suddenly resolves itself. He remembers learning to play the piano, being forced to master first one hand, and then the other, denied the full glory of the song until both hands were ready to play as one. It is like that.

He goes from feeling as if climax is an unattainable impossibility, to crying at Levi’s sloped ceiling in what feels like seconds. He grabs one of Levi’s pillows, tries to cover his face with it because knowing Levi can _see_ him like this is just too, too much, but Levi yanks it away and strokes Erwin’s cheek with his free hand, calls him lovely and beautiful and _filthy_ and _mea, mea, mea--_

Erwin begs him for more, harder, faster, fuck, _fuck, Levi, fuck--_ And Levi gives him everything he asks for, starts to whisper, “I’ve _never--Erwin-- mea, mea cor-- carissimus-- you--”_

Erwin feels everything snap, feels his chest seize like he’s sobbing when he comes. Levi curls forward and smothers Erwin with a kiss, bites his bottom lip and tugs when Erwin can’t collect himself enough to actually kiss Levi back. 

“Tomorrow?” Levi’s voice sounds tight, strained, even though Erwin can hear him teasing. 

Erwin jerks his head. “Yes, _yes, fuck_ whenever you-- yes--”

And Levi joins him, biting off a shout, hips stuttering and then going still so Erwin can feel the way he pulses. 

When the last tremor has left Levi’s body, he falls forward across Erwin’s (frankly _filthy)_ chest and lays his ear between Erwin’s pectorals. Erwin lets his breath return. Lays his hand across Levi’s low back. When he shivers once, Levi tugs the blanket out from under him wordlessly and lays it across the both of them. He returns his ear to Erwin’s chest. 

He is quiet again. Pensive. 

Erwin says, “Are you listening to my heart, Levi?” 

_Levi._ He will never get tired of speaking that name. 

“I-- yes,” Levi answers. 

“Loud?” 

“Strong.” 

“We should clean up,” Erwin mutters, because he doesn’t know how to reply to that. 

“Yes,” Levi answers. Neither of them move. 

Erwin sleeps. He knows he sleeps because he wakes with a start when Levi curses and jolts away from him. He hears the door slam before he can turn his head to follow Levi’s movement. 

“What--”

“Fucking _cunt bitch fuck--”_

“What’s wrong?” Erwin asks blearily, sitting up and staring at Levi. He has both hands on his bedroom door. Erwin watches him flip the lock. 

“ _Hanji didn’t shut the door.”_

“So?” Erwin asks, nonplussed. 

“ _So,”_ Levi drawls. “They _heard us.”_

Erwin furrows his brows. “Of course they did,” he answers, fighting back a blush. He hadn’t let himself think about how easy it was for the denizens of the house to know what was going on in Levi’s room. 

Levi groans. “The lock is _spelled,_ Erwin, I don’t make a fucking habit of letting every stray--baby-- _leech_ know what’s going on in my fucking _bedroom.”_

Erwin smiles at him. “Oops.” 

“Oops,” Levi repeats, rolling his eyes. Erwin watches him clean himself off. He hands Erwin a towel, damp with rosewater from Levi’s vanity. Erwin towels himself down. 

“So do you think _Eren_ heard?” 

Levi turns and looks at him in open shock. And then he starts to laugh. “Show off.” 

“Come back to bed.” 

Levi smiles at him. _Actually_ smiles and climbs back under the covers. 

“Ugh, these are wet,” he complains when Erwin settles behind him. 

“Sorry,” Erwin replies, a squirm of pleasure and embarrassment radiating through his gut. 

Levi turns into him, puts his forehead on Erwin’s chest. Then he mutters, “You’re so fucking warm.” 

“Are you cold?” Erwin asks curiously. 

Levi shakes his head. “No, not really. But this--” He pauses. “I don’t realize until I feel… warm things.” 

Erwin tucks his chin over Levi’s head, throws his arm over Levi’s shoulder, and even though he should, he doesn’t feel cold either. 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have nothing to say for myself except I guess this is just this kinda fic you guys. I'M SORRY. If you are sticking with me through all the fits and starts, I thank you SO MUCH. You are amazing and you encourage me SO MUCH. <3<3<3

Erwin awakes to a knock at the door. He cracks one eye and watches Levi set a book down on the end table and cross the room, fully nude. He has been sleeping for a long time. He can't see any sunlight in the tiny broken chink in Levi's shutters; he must have slept the whole day away. 

Hanji pushes roughly passed Levi and waltzes in with a smile when Levi cracks the door. 

Erwin twitches the blanket over his thighs but can't be bothered to do much more. His wrist is sore; his thighs are sore; _other places_ are sore, and he's warm and content not to move a single muscle if he doesn't have to. 

Levi doesn't bother covering himself and Hanji doesn't seem to take notice. Erwin isn't sure how; he can't stop staring at every pale muscle, at scars he hadn't noticed before in the dark, and tattoos too. He wants to light a candle so he can see better-- only the light from the hall is enough to tease Erwin with hints of just how beautiful Levi really is. 

Hanji shoves a decanter roughly in Levi's hands and then just _grins_ at Erwin. Erwin peers between Hanji and Levi-- who is now staring at Hanji in silent annoyance-- and finally says, "Don't look at me like that." 

"I'm not looking at you any special way," Hanji says innocently. "Why would I be looking at you any special way? Hmm?" 

Levi shoves them on the shoulder. "You could have warned me the door was open." 

Hanji whirls and pats Levi on the cheek. He looks like he's considering strangling them. "I tried, sweetie. You were _distracted."_

Levi narrows his eyes, uncorks the decanter, and takes a drink. 

"How's the arm?" Hanji demands, turning to face Erwin. 

Erwin rolls his wrist experimentally. It's stiff, and the paste Levi had used drags under the bandage but it's not nearly as sore as it should be. 

"Good, good," Hanji crows innocently. "We've got our very own _god_ staying with us and we wouldn't want him winding up _hurt_ now would we?" 

" _Get out,"_ Levi hisses. Before Hanji can protests, he's grabbed them by the shoulder and is shoving them forcefully from the room. Erwin's cheeks feel hot again and he's glad to see them go. Levi slams the door behind them and locks it, muttering venomously under his breath. He only pauses to drain the decanter in one single draft. Erwin is impressed; he usually nurses one of these deliveries for hours. "Worked up an appetite?" 

Levi makes a foul motion with his hand and drops the empty crystal on his table. 

"Why do you do that?" Erwin finally asks him curiously. 

"What?" 

"Why not-- you know..." Erwin trails off and motions vaguely to his own neck. " _Down stairs?"_

"Oh." Levi is suddenly hesitant, looking away. "I, uh. Well, I usually do," he answers carefully. Erwin is glad he doesn't have to ask Levi to come back to bed. Levi crawls in beside him and busies himself with the blankets while he speaks. "But after. After what happened with... with you. I asked Hanji to..." He motions to the decanter. 

"What happened with me?" Erwin presses. He shimmies down lower into the sheets and surprises himself when he lays his head across Levi's lap. Levi seems surprised too, but not displeased. He adjusts himself so his back is to the headboard and then strokes Erwin's hair off his forehead. 

"The night we met," Levi says very slowly. "I. I lost control. I don't do that. So. I was worried. Something." He clears his throat. "I thought was a losing my fucking mind and figured I couldn't be trusted around living people for the time being," he grits out finally, in one long coarse rush.

Erwin lifts his head and stares at Levi, brows furrowed. 

Levi mumbles, "You're just different, alright? I don't know why." 

Erwin puts his head back down. Levi is different too. It scares Erwin. Not because of what Levi is, but because of how much Erwin wants him, how terrified he is that this will all be taken away. It would be easier if Levi _had_ bewitched him. He could make that fit in his world, could make himself understand. But he doesn't understand this. He never wants to move from this spot. He could die here. 

Levi seems like he wants to say something, like he'll continue talking, but after a time, he just shifts for his book and starts to read again, one hand still gentling at the nape of Erwin's neck. 

Erwin mutters, "You read more than anyone else I've ever met." And that is saying something because until quite recently, Erwin read quite a lot. 

"I." Levi wants to talk. Erwin decides to wait and let him. "I was a slave," he says, _very_ quietly. Erwin frowns. Zeke had said they’d guessed as much, but something in Erwin had always assumed he’d been wrong. Who could ever possibly hope to bind _Levi?_

"A… an entertainment slave." 

Erwin’s stomach curdles. "What's that mean?" he whispers. 

Levi is quiet. When he speaks, Erwin can tell he is dredging these words from the very pits of memory. "It means I fought. So I wasn't educated. Some slaves were. But not me.” 

He speaks in slow, short sentences, halting between phrases and Erwin doesn’t interrupt him. He wants to talk, but Erwin has to let him come to the words in his own time. He understands that now. 

“I didn't learn to read until after I died. I never wanted to stop, I guess." 

"How... how did you..."

Levi rolls his eyes at the ceiling. "It's not a story I usually tell people," he grumbles. But he hasn't ended the conversation. He has left himself open, left soft spots for Erwin to press. 

"Not even for your _cor?"_ Erwin asks quietly. 

Levi breaths out through his nose. "Would you give away all the things you wish you didn't remember so goddamn easily?" Levi half snaps. 

"For you?" 

Levi narrows his eyes. Then he says, "I cleaned shit or shoveled it when I was young and...my.” Levi pauses. His jaw slides. “A man I knew… taught me how to fight. When I was a little older. I. He, uh. Sold me." Erwin’s eyes go wide at the air in front of Levi’s knee. “I was a fighter,” Levi finishes. 

"A gladiator?" Erwin says sharply, turning his head and looking up, mostly so he won’t have to truly think about the idea of someone _selling_ Levi. Someone Levi knew. Erwin recalls what he knows of Roman culture and his mouth tastes sour. Poor families sometimes sold their children into slavery. Had Levi been--

"Uh. Sort of.” Levi interrupts the flow of thoughts and Erwin pulls himself from that terrible tangent. “They weren't-- gladiators the way you're thinking, they weren't until later. These fights were... were smaller." He pauses, peers down at the blankets. 

Erwin looks at Levi's chest in the dark. He is close enough that he can see some scars, realizes he'd felt some the night before. "Is that... these?" he asks, laying his hand across the largest of them, a huge X-shaped mark on the front of Levi's shoulder. 

Levi nods. "I was a good fighter. Made my master a lot of money." The way he says that word, _master,_ so casually, with no venom at all. It makes Erwin’s blood surge in nauseated fury. The sheer _resignation,_ the awful mundanity. 

"How... how old were you?" Erwin asks quietly. 

Levi shrugs. "Told you I don't really know. I think. I think I was sold when I was..." Levi furrows his brow. "How old are the little ones, before their voices drop?" He holds up his hand as if to measure the height of someone very small.

Erwin blinks at him. "Uh... that starts maybe... maybe eleven or twelve or so?" 

Levi shrugs. "Maybe that then." 

"Zeke told me you were... arrested for witchcraft." 

Levi's face darkens at once and Erwin is afraid he has said a very, _very_ wrong thing. 

"I _wasn't,"_ he hisses. 

"Arrested?"

"A _witch."_

"But. But you..."

"That came later. It was. I. Won. I won a fight I wasn't supposed to win. Someone accused my master of cheating and it-- it was political, and the _fucking rumors_ \-- but by the end of it, they were claiming I was an _enslaved demon_ or some other fucking _bullshit_ and--"

"And they arrested you," Erwin finishes.

"And. And others," Levi adds quietly. Erwin watches his throat bob, watches the painful way he swallows. "My family." 

"The man from my library?" 

" _No. Not him._ They were... slaves. Slaves too. We were... _like_ family. More family than _he_ ever was." 

Erwin is silent. Did that mean the vampire from the library really was…?

Levi breaths out very slowly. 

Erwin considers what he is going to say next very carefully. Levi’s whole body feels tight. When Erwin looks at him, his eyes are distant. Sad. Erwin lifts himself before he can think better of it and kisses Levi on the lips. He will learn more later. 

Levi kisses him back. 

*

When Erwin’s stomach is so loud Levi can feel it rumbling, he kicks Erwin out into the hallway and demands he go find food. Sasha is in the kitchen, along with Eren and Mikasa. When Erwin enters the room, Sasha pointedly keeps talking to Mikasa who doesn’t acknowledge Erwin at all. 

Eren just _stares_ at him. 

Erwin feels his cheeks get hot and nods a stiff greeting before he starts looking for something to eat. He settles on eggs and toast until he realizes he’s only vaguely aware of how to fry an egg. But since it can’t be much more difficult than the chicken, he silently gives it a go. 

He burns the first two, and breaks the yoke on the third, but the fourth and fifth seem about right. He’s about to drop the first three in the waste bin when he hears Sasha hiss. Before he can blink, she’s at his side, holding his wrist to keep him from tilting the plate over and giving him a truly dirty look. He raises his brows and hands her the plate instead. She tucks in. 

Erwin almost takes his plate up to Levi’s room, but at the last minute he decides not to. It’s dark, and Levi probably won’t appreciate the crumbs from his toast. Instead he tries to unobtrusively drop his plate on the table and take a seat. That’s when he realizes what it is Mikasa and Sasha are talking about. 

“I’m sure,” Mikasa deadpans. 

“That’s impossible,” Sasha replies. “He doesn’t have _family.”_

“Descendants?” Mikasa suggests. 

Sasha snorts and shakes her head. “After all this time? Wouldn’t smell the same.” 

“Zeke smells nothing like me,” Eren announces. 

Sasha rolls her eyes at him. “Oh, how would you know, you idiot?” 

“He does a little,” Mikasa tells him. 

“I’m better looking.” 

Erwin stares at Eren then without really thinking about it. He doesn’t realize what he’s done until Eren gives him a surley, “What?” 

Erwin shrugs. “You are.” 

They all lift their heads and just look at him. Erwin shrugs again and eats his toast. 

Then Eren says, _very_ slyly, “You think so?” 

Erwin lifts his eyes. “I met him. He’s. He’s got cruel eyes.” At the silence that greets that proclamation, Erwin adds, “He called Levi a monster.” At that, they all get a little steelier, a little more resolute, in a strange way. 

Mikasa breaks the silence when she says, “Nor is hypocrisy an attractive trait.” When Erwin just glances at her questioningly, she says, “The man with him was a vampire.” 

“I’d guessed that,” Erwin comments. “Who was he?” Mikasa and Sasha give him blank looks. Eren stares down at the table. “You don’t know?” 

“He didn’t tell you?” Eren counters. 

Erwin shakes his head. “That man said something, in the library.”

“We heard,” Eren interjects. “A little. It sounded like he said Levi was his _nephew_ …”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Sasha proclaims. “We’d know if Levi still had family living. Er. Walking. Wouldn’t we?” 

“Levi seemed to know him,” Eren replies. 

Erwin doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t like speculating about Levi like this; he’d rather just ask Levi himself. He opens his mouth to change the subject, and the kitchen door opens. 

Some deep, sunken part of Erwin’s psyche recognizes who has stepped into the room before Erwin actually sees, and that deep, hidden part of him curls in terror. Instinct screams at him to run, to move, to hide, and he drops his fork loudly, sits up, before his consciousness can catch up with the rest of him. His heart beats so quickly it hurts. 

It is Annie. 

She turns her cold blue eyes on Erwin and Erwin feels a shiver crawl up his spine. She looks better than she had the first time they met-- there is even a slightly rosy cast to her pale cheeks. Desperation doesn’t roll from her body in waves. Her hair is combed and her clothes are fresh. Erwin watches her pupils dilate in the instant that she sees him, and then he realizes Sasha and Eren and Mikasa have all gone very quiet. And they’re watching Annie too, with narrowed, flinty eyes and thin lips. 

Annie’s nostrils flare. Erwin knows why, knows she can smell him, knows she is probably thinking of the way he _tastes._

“Hanji told me to explore.” She breaks the silence, her voice deeper than Erwin expects it to be. 

Sasha says, “This is the kitchen.” 

Annie nods. She looks at Erwin’s hands on the table. 

His heart rate is falling a little now. Enough that his voice doesn’t shake when he says, “Feeling better?” 

She blinks and doesn’t lift her eyes from Erwin’s hands. “Yes.” There is a long, empty silence. “Thank you.” 

Eren leans back in his seat and crosses his arms over his chest, a smug expression on his face all at once. Sasha seems satisfied as well. Mikasa, of course, just seems uninterested. 

“You owe him more than a thank you.” 

Relief floods Erwin’s system so quickly it is almost shameful. Levi stands directly behind her, blocking her exit. 

Annie turns and stares down at him, shoulders high and tight. 

After a long moment, Annie turns around and meets Erwin’s eye. “I’m sorry.” 

Levi steps aside. Annie leaves and Erwin tries not to think about the way she looked at him, about the strange hopelessness in her gaze, about how much it reminds Erwin of Levi. 

Instead, he looks at Levi and feels safe again. 

*

It alarms Erwin how much nothing seems to matter all of a sudden. Everything that he’d cared about, everything that worried and concerned him, he trades it all for the feel of Levi’s sheets against his naked skin, for tucking his chin over Levi’s soft hair, for the sounds Levi makes when Erwin kisses over every ancient scar. 

He forgets to worry about his house. He forgets to think about who the vampire from his library was, or how he got inside Erwin’s house if Erwin didn’t ask him in. He forgets to be fearful of the people who want to hunt him down, who want to hunt _Levi_ down. He forgets everything he ever thought was valuable and instead fills his head with knowing the man he finds infinitely more important. 

He can’t force himself to care about sigil stones and shielding wards when he discovers the the soles of Levi’s feet are ticklish, and also if Erwin kisses a very particular spot on the arch of his foot, Levi’s whole body shudders and then goes extraordinarily limp. He can’t convince himself to worry about Marylians taking over his house when instead he is memorizing the microexpressions Levi wears as he reads. No part of him is capable of wondering what other kinds of creatures exist in the world when he is busy learning that Levi knows how to make him come so hard his legs won’t work for hours after. The first time it happens, he nearly concusses himself on the linen trunk after he trips trying to retrieve fresh bed sheets. How can he give a single fuck about Zeke Jaeger when he remembers the way Levi had laughed at him, smug and charmed and, for at least a moment, _happy?_

Levi teaches him other things too. How to cast a simple charm. How to make the bed just right and how to dust. How to speak his most secret thoughts in a dead language so only Levi can hear them. 

*

Two months pass, and Erwin has only left the house once, a week after the night they returned to his home. He takes Sasha into the city at noon and hires a steward to tend to his house and his finances. He writes Mike a letter saying he has decided to take a long, private holiday in the countryside. Mike is the only one who could possibly worry about him. 

In two months he and Levi have erased all semblance of Erwin maintaining a private room. All his books are on Levi’s shelves; all his clothes are in Levi’s drawers. The table where Levi reads has become a shared space, with Erwin’s Latin translations and the spell books Levi has given him to study strewn across one side, and the other immaculately neat with whatever book Levi happens to be reading resting in the naked center. Erwin knows Levi hates the expanding sprawl of his workspace, but aside from straightening the papers into slightly neater piles during the half hour or so that he cleans his room every day, he doesn’t complain. 

After a month, Levi had given him a keystone. “You can go anywhere in the house with this,” he’d explained. Erwin understood that no one else had access to _every_ room in the house-- the library, a few rooms in the cellar that Erwin hadn’t gotten around to asking about, _all_ the tenants’ personal spaces, not that Erwin would ever look-- and he studied the stone Levi had given him very closely. It fit in his hand, was just a little warm, and if Erwin turned his head just right, it glimmered. It was a small, round, smooth piece of turquoise, shot through with black veins. 

“Don’t lose it,” Levi had said, and Erwin had understood just from those three words how _important_ this stone was, how dangerous. He wasn’t entirely sure what Levi was entrusting him with, but he knew it was big. 

He found a little pouch to keep the stone in, along with the first keystone Levi had given him and he kept the pouch either in his inner waistcoat pocket or on the bedside table when he slept. 

A month later, it is Petra and not Hanji who brings Levi his evening meal. Erwin is laying in bed, reading by candle light and trying to decide what to cook for himself when she knocks. She enters holding the decanter out like it is poisonous and wrinkling her nose. Erwin sits up and puts his book down. Petra is still keeping tabs on his house. She walks by at least twice a week and reports anything strange to Levi. So far she has had nothing interesting to tell them. 

Levi takes the decanter and wordlessly takes a sip. Petra makes a face like she is going to be sick. 

“What?” Erwin laughs at her. “Don’t like the sight of a little _blood?”_

Petra shakes her head while Levi pointedly looks away from them both. “I just don’t know how you can do that every night,” she tells Levi. “I’d go crazy.” Levi shrugs, expressionless. But he has paused the path of the decanter halfway to his lips and now he sets it down. 

After Petra leaves, Erwin eyes the crystal. “Is it very different?” 

Levi shrugs. Erwin stares at him and he seems to realize what he’s done, that he’s lying to Erwin again, or at least downplaying some important fact. “It’s. Not pleasant,” he says gruffly. 

“Then why?” Erwin chuckles at him. “You can-- there’s all these people here every night. Why torture yourself?” 

“I told you, I thought--”

“Levi,” Erwin tells him reasonably. “You’re not going to hurt anyone.” 

Levi frowns and stares at the decanter. 

And that is how Erwin finds himself in the cellar. 

He is used to this place now. He comes down sometimes, when he wants to see another human, or wants a little company. Now that he understands the nuance of this place, he sees that the air of the cellar is often jovial. The tenants are at ease here. They laugh and joke with one another and tease the guests. Erwin enjoys, sometimes, being a fly on this wall, enjoys the peek into this strange world he had never hoped to fully penetrate. 

When they both sit down on a sofa against the far wall, though, Erwin can sense that everyone is surprised. When Levi comes to the cellar, he usually paces the walls like a guard; it is clear to all the guests that he is off limits. 

But sitting on the sofa signals something different, that he is here for more than just security. 

He is tense; Erwin can feel it. Instead of scanning the room for someone _appealing,_ he stares at Erwin. Instead of sprawling across the cushion, throwing his feet in Erwin’s lap or curling his hand in Erwin’s hair, he sits stiff and straight. Erwin laughs at him. 

“You’re worse than Reiner,” Erwin tells him. Of the three latest additions to the house, Erwin has noticed Reiner seems the least comfortable with the cellar arrangements. When Erwin has spotted him down here, he is always stiff shouldered and awkward. Annie, with her dead-eyed stare, does well enough. Bertolt, with his long limbs and quiet shyness, seems to be a favorite of the handful of middle aged women who come here. 

“Fuck off.” 

“What are you so worried about?” 

Levi shrugs. 

“Should I pretend to be jealous? So you can have an actual reason to worry?”

Levi only scoffs and turns his face away from Erwin, but his shoulders seem a bit looser after that. 

“Haven’t you done this for millenia anyway?” 

“I haven’t always run a fucking brothel, Erwin.” 

“I’d assumed you’d lived in one,” Erwin answers smoothly. 

Levi rolls his eyes. “Maybe a little.” 

“Are there a lot of places like this?” 

“Not like this,” Levi replies smugly. 

“You know what I meant. With people like you.” 

“You’d be surprised,” Levi tells him, eyes flat, “How high the demand is for this sort of thing.” 

Erwin chuckles, and the sound stalls in his throat when he feels a hand on his shoulder. He turns absently, halfway thinking it is Eren, who he’d seen moving along the edges of the room from the corner of his eye, but instead he comes face to face with a truly beautiful stranger. 

She is young, maybe even younger than Erwin, and that alone makes her strange. Most of the women who come here are past what some men might consider their prime. She’s dressed in fine silks, with her hair in a gorgeous twist at the back of her head. She drips jewels, and she is wearing a wedding band. She looks down at Erwin with a strangely expectant expression on her face and Erwin says blankly, “Yes?” 

She blinks at him, and when she opens her mouth, her voice is smooth like honey. “Am I interrupting? I thought you seemed like you would be an… interesting conversationalist.” 

Erwin furrows his brows at her. “Um.”

Levi snorts. When they both look at him, he throws one arm over the back of the chair and says, “Sure, sweetheart, _converse_ away. You probably have a lot in common. _Like pulses.”_

The woman drops her hand from Erwin’s shoulder. “ _Oh.”_

“Also a preference for cock.” 

Erwin stares wide eyed at Levi. There is a long beat, and then the woman says in a rush. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-- I mean I just assumed--”

Erwin turns and looks at her curiously, after shooting Levi a particularly dirty look. “That I was one of them?” He isn’t sure if he should be offended or flattered. But then it has been nearly two months since he’s seen a sunrise. He's probably looking a little sallow. 

“I’m sorry,” she says sincerely.

Erwin shakes his head. “It’s alright.” 

“I should--” she begins. 

“Who are you here for, sweetheart?” Levi interrupts. Erwin finds the pet name strange, recalls how Levi had spoken it to him once, just like this, and once more that was not like this _at all_. It was almost like an insult when he said it, but one that was somehow addictive. 

“Ymir,” the woman answers. 

Levi nods. “Well, that figures.” 

“It does?” she asks. Her voice has taken on a wry tone, now that her initial embarrassment has faded. 

“Ymir’s a slut for pretty young women,” Levi tells her. 

Erwin starts to stare again. He is looking at Levi, certainly. This creature sits like Levi and he talks like Levi, is just as crass and coarse as Levi always is, except there is something _about_ him, something enticing and self assured in a very _un-_ Levi-like way.

The woman tilts her head, eyes going oddly soft and Erwin realizes Levi has complimented her, easily, almost underhandedly. 

“Well, aren’t you sweet?” she comments. 

Levi smiles at her ( _vicious)_ and shakes his head. “No.” 

“You flatter me,” she tells him. 

“Look around, love,” Levi tells her, waving his hand. “It’s not flattery.” 

The woman turns her head and Erwin does too. He sees what Levi means. Most of the men and at least half of the women are looking at the three of them, some outright staring, and others taking quick, interested glances. 

“Take your pick,” he tells her. Then he smiles wickedly and tilts his head at Erwin. “Just make sure they’re not human first.” 

“And what about you?” she asks immediately. “Are you… like Ymir?” 

Levi grins at her and Erwin is shocked when he sees Levi’s pink tongue press against the too sharp point of his right canine. The woman’s eyes go wide and hungry. It’s a move. Erwin knows it is, but it is still so bizzare to see this side of Levi, to see him playing at some predatory imitation of seduction, to see that not only is he _good_ at it, but it’s _working._

“I am not like Ymir.” 

“No?” she presses ( _teases)_ , and Erwin understands. There was, at this moment, an alarming similarity. 

Levi crosses his arms over his chest. “No.” 

The woman stares at Levi. Levi stares back at her. 

“What do I call you?” 

“Whatever you want, sweetheart.” 

Erwin looks at Levi sharply, and Levi’s strange swaggering air falters, for just a second. 

He says, “My name is Levi.” Then he adds. “This is Erwin.” 

“Levi,” she purrs, holding her hand out. Levi doesn’t rise from the sofa, but he does kiss her knuckles. Erwin is surprised when she turns her brilliant eyes on him and adds, “And Erwin.” Her eyes are blue, but they are _very_ dark. “May I join you?” 

Levi throws himself across the sofa, all at once, into Erwin’s arms. He lounges against Erwin’s chest, leaves the corner where he had been sitting for the woman to settle into. When she does, he throws one leg over the back of the sofa and curls the other onto the cushion so he is splayed, open legged, facing her. Erwin is almost embarrassed for her, except she openly stares at Levi as she sits down. She tells them her name is Selene.

“Where’d Ymir find you?” Levi asks her, voice an odd singsong. 

“A party,” Selene answers, eyes glittering. 

“Was she trying to find a witch or did she just get lucky?” 

Erwin blinks. Selene actually gapes at Levi. Levi just grins. 

“I don’t know what you’re-”

Levi sniffs. “Like recognizes like. And you smell like power.” 

Selene considers him. 

Levi says, “Oh, I see now. How bored you are. That’s how she got you isn’t it? Is your new husband just _dreadfully fucking dull?”_ Levi asks, affecting a stiff, posh accent that is ruined by the vulgarity. 

Selene’s eyes get wide. 

Erwin finally says mildly, “You’re going to scare her off.” 

“Nah, I’m not,” Levi replies. “She’s looking for a little _fun,_ this one. Won’t let me scare her, will she?” 

“Fun,” Selene asks. Her expression is suddenly distant. Erwin realizes she has been twisting her wedding band and he guesses that is how Levi knew she was newly wed. It is as if the ring feels foreign to her. 

Levi says, “I can be your fun.” 

Selene lifts her dark blue eyes. “What are we waiting for?” 

Levi is standing all at once, taking her by the hand. He pulls her to her feet, wastes no time in moving off toward the private rooms, but she pulls back. When Levi looks at her, she licks her lips and then looks at Erwin. “Can he come?” 

Erwin feels his jaw drop. _What the--_

Levi grins, obviously incredibly amused, and says, “Ask him.” 

Selene turns her head, looks Erwin in the eye. Erwin suddenly feels as if _everyone_ is looking at him. 

“I’m not sure if,” Erwin begins a little awkwardly. 

Levi saves him by stepping into her side and whispering in her ear. He has to stand on his tiptoes to do it-- she’s almost a head taller than he is. “I told you, honey. He doesn’t like--”

Erwin stands. Levi is right. Selene is beautiful, but Erwin can’t seem to muster much interest in her. 

It is Levi he is concerned with. He’s fascinated by this side of Levi; he knows it is an act, a bit of playful fun and little more, that this is not at all the _real_ Levi, _his_ Levi, but that almost makes it all the more enticing. He wants to know what Levi will do and how he will do it. He wants to… he wants to watch Levi take this woman apart in almost the same ways he takes Erwin apart. 

She is already putty in his hands, which is its own sort of miracle. She doesn’t strike Erwin as the sort of woman to be particularly malleable. 

Selene grins, and reaches out to grab Erwin by the waistcoat. He swallows hard and lets himself be tugged out of the room. And he absolutely does not look at the way everyone watches it happen. 

Just before the door closes, however, he does catch sight of Jean, leaning against the wall nearest them. He smiles, and gives Erwin an enthusiastic gesture that may or may not be entirely sarcastic. 

Levi leads them both to a room similar to the one he’d first taken Erwin to. There is a wide sofa against one wall, and through a doorway with no door, Erwin sees a large, pillow strewn bed. 

Erwin blushes through their negotiation. There is something infinitely more filthy, somehow, about the frank way they lay out their expectations. Levi suggests Selene offer him her wrist. She coyly tells him she’d prefer his lips on her breast. He smirks and counters by brushing the hair off her shoulder and rubbing his thumb over a spot on her neck that makes her tilt her head and shiver. “Here,” he says. “I’ll be gentle so you don’t scar. If you wear your hair down this week, no one will see.” 

Wide eyed, she nods. Then she suggests sex and Erwin’s stomach lurches. 

But Levi only smiles at her and shakes his head. “No, thank you.” 

Selene narrows her eyes and looks passed Levi at Erwin, perched awkwardly on the edge of the sofa. “ _Preferences?”_ she teases Levi. 

Levi shrugs. “I think we’d scandalize him.” _That_ is Levi at least; dodging a question about himself with a comment aimed at someone else. 

Erwin glares at him. 

Levi puts his hand on Selene’s shoulder in a suggestive, possessive way. Her dress is low cut, with thick straps and no sleeves. She’d been wearing a shawl over her shoulders but Levi has pushed it down so it hangs from her elbows. “Have you ever even seen a naked woman before?” he asks curiously.

Erwin tilts his head. “Once.” The experience had been, overall, quite pleasant, but it had still cemented in Erwin’s mind that he hadn’t the faintest sexual interest in the female form, no matter how beautiful she was. But because Levi is looking at him like he’s slightly concerned for him, and like he’s just a bit too naive, Erwin looks at Selene and adds, “She wasn’t nearly as beautiful as you.” 

The words feel strange and awkward in his mouth, but Levi gives him an amused and approving little nod, and Selene smiles. She’s staring at Erwin as Levi settles behind her on the couch, curls one arm around her waist. 

“Is this alright with you?” Levi asks him then. “You really wanna _watch?”_

Erwin stares at them. He wonders what it says about him that he does. He _really_ does.

He nods. 

Levi’s eyes on him are suddenly hyper focused, pleased, dark. For the first time since the night Erwin had met him, Erwin watches the silver in his iris spread out, fill up his whole eye, and Levi breaths, “Good.” 

He tightens his arm around her waist and pulls her closer. Erwin hears her breath hitch. Anticipation. Eager anticipation. Jealousy surges in Erwin’s chest like a tidal wave. Levi pushes her head to the side gently, but firmly, and lowers his mouth to her skin. 

Erwin knows what those hands feel like. He can imagine exactly what it is this woman feels when Levi holds her. He is exceedingly soft. The way he brushes her hair off her neck, the way he holds her, the way his mouth closes so _carefully._

Her eyes close and she groans _very_ softly. Levi is…. He’s watching Erwin and Erwin is suddenly unsure if he should be here, if he can possibly stand this. Levi is being very gentle, which only serves to remind Erwin of the night they’d met, the way Levi had _torn_ into him, how he’d held Erwin down and--

His breathing has gotten too shallow. Levi’s pure silver eyes are endlessly amused and Erwin has to bite his lip to keep from stopping the whole thing, to keep from demanding all of Levi’s attention _right now,_ he wants it, he wants it all for himself--

It is somehow too long and terribly short. Erwin holds himself very still, tries to ignore how much he hates and loves this at the same time. It is a strange, special kind of torture. When Levi finally pulls away from her, and licks his lips, Selene smiles serenely and turns her head just a little. Levi kisses her on the forehead, and Erwin wonders if it is possible to die of unbridled jealousy. 

Levi guides Selene down on the sofa. She looks relaxed, at ease. She’s smiling, looking at him lazily. Levi runs his thumb over the place where he has marked her and sucks his finger into his mouth when it comes away bloody. 

Erwin has had enough. He’s not sure what he wants, what he’s thinking, but then Levi looks at him. His eyes aren’t fading. They practically sparkle in the dim lighting. 

Erwin’s heart jumps into his throat when Levi crawls over her lap, hurls himself into Erwin’s arms, and climbs Erwin exactly like he had the night they met. Erwin can taste her on his breath. It’s instantaneous, the way he’s gasping at Levi’s hands, his lips, his teeth. 

“I want that.” He is surprised when the words _finally_ force their way from his lips. He's been thinking it for weeks, has craved it, but he's been loath to admit it. Levi seems to think poorly, somehow, of the people who come here, who allow themselves to be fed upon like cattle, who view beings like Levi as objects of twisted desire and not like people at all. 

Levi tsks and whispers very quietly, “You’re _so much more_ , carissimus-- _”_

Erwin groans, _whines,_ and says, “You’d rather-- with _strangers--”_

“I _hurt_ you.”

“Do it again.” 

Levi whimpers in his ear, his fingers fisting suddenly in Erwin’s hair. 

Selene clears her throat. Erwin almost forgot she was there, and he gasps suddenly when he turns to look at her. 

She chuckles. “I get a show too?” 

Levi sits back, breathing just as hard as Erwin, and says, “You want one?” 

She stretches languidly and asks, “Carissimus?” 

Levi's expression shutters. He glances down at Erwin’s chest and Erwin says, in Levi's Latin this time, “We can send her away.”

Levi looks at Selene and says quietly, “It means ‘dear one. Dearest.’”

“Lovers than?” she asks lazily. 

Erwin and Levi don't say anything. They just look at each other. 

Then Levi asks, also in Latin, “Do you want her to leave?” 

“I don't care,” Erwin surprises himself by saying. “I just want you.”

Levi kisses him again, hungry, a little frantic, and Erwin arches his back when Levi bends toward his neck all at once, without warning. 

He draws back at the last second and Erwin feels him swipe his thumb over the white scar he'd been about to kiss over. 

“Somewhere hidden,” he whispers quietly. 

Erwin almost groans in protest. He has felt lips at his wrist before and it is _not_ the same. 

Levi says softly, “Take off your pants.” 

Erwin stands up immediately, takes Levi with him. It never occurs to him to argue, or to even think of his modesty. In fact, he is pleased she is here. He has never admitted it aloud, or even let himself think it fully, but he loves the way Levi claims him. He loves that everyone knows he is Levi’s. He loves that everyone knows Levi is his. And Levi _is_ his. It’s why he had been happy to let Levi come here, to find whoever he cared to, whatever he required to sustain himself that didn’t involve cold, congealing blood bottled in crystal. It hadn’t occurred to him to be jealous until he was watching it happen, because he never had any doubt that Levi would come back to him, that he’d be thinking of no one but Erwin, that there was nothing _personal_ about what he would do in these private rooms. 

Erwin is not wearing shoes. He hadn’t bothered putting any on, before he came downstairs, so it is easy for him to unbutton his pants with one hand and hold Levi up with the other. The pants fall, he steps out of them, and Levi unwinds his legs from Erwin’s waist so Erwin has to set him down. 

“Lay down.” 

Erwin peers down at Levi, looks behind him at the sofa, and then through the door to the bed. He’s about to take Levi by the hand when Selene hums sweetly, adjusts herself on the sofa, and holds up her arms. Erwin peers at her in confusion. Levi smirks and presses one hand to his chest so he has to sit back down. He thumps heavily onto the couch and he can’t think straight. The way Levi is _looking_ at him. He can feel it under his skin, in the pulse of his heart, in the tips of his fingers. 

Selene’s hand curls around the side of his head and he barely notices. Levi glances at her once, gives her a short, approving nod, and Erwin finds himself with his head in her lap and her hands in his hair. It’s pleasant, comforting, grounds him in a strange way; Levi’s attentions are threatening to overwhelm him completely. Levi pushes Erwin’s shirt tails up to his stomach, exposes his thighs and his cock to the dim light and Erwin loses track of himself, is trapped in the white noise in his head, replaying the way Levi’s hands ghost along the tops of his thighs, the pleased little sound he makes. 

He is achingly, embarrassingly hard and he can’t hide. 

Selene tsks and Erwin grabs onto the sound of her voice. “What a waste.” 

“It’s not a waste to me,” Levi says sharply, lifting his head and fixing her with a firm stare. He’s kneeling between Erwin’s legs, hands on Erwin’s hips. Erwin is too long for the sofa; his legs are sprawled, one knee bent and leaning against the sofa back, the other dangling over the cushions. 

Her fingers curl in Erwin’s hair. “Of course not. Sorry, darling.” 

Levi nods at her. 

And bends forward to kiss Erwin on the lips. 

It calms him, in a way. This is familiar. They’ve done this before and even if it never stops setting his skin aflame, it’s taken on a comforting sort of air. 

“Are you sure you want to do this, _carissimus?”_

“Don’t make me beg you,” Erwin answers, huskily. 

“Would you?” 

“You know I would.”

Levi takes Erwin’s lip between his teeth, pulls back enough that Erwin can see his gorgeous eyes, impossibly, inhumanly silver in the flickering shadows. 

He sits back at all once, nips Erwin’s lip just a little too hard before he lets go, so Erwin arches his back and yelps at the jolt of pain. 

The yelp fades to a whimper when Levi puts his lips against the knee Erwin has leaning against the sofa back. He kisses a trail along the inside of Erwin’s thigh, gentle, teasing, until Erwin is squirming on the sofa because Levi has done this before but he’d been taunting Erwin with the promise of his lips on Erwin’s cock. Erwin knows vaguely that this is not Levi’s end now, but his skin still remembers each soft pressing kiss, and as Levi works his way lower, Erwin can feel a tortuous pulse between his legs. 

Levi pauses at a spot high on the inside of Erwin’s thigh, and Erwin’s heart stutters in his chest. He thinks of the night they met, of the way he felt the world stop turning in the moment before he felt Levi’s teeth against his skin and is somehow surprised to realize nothing has changed. It doesn’t matter that they’ve been fucking each other at least once a day for months. It doesn’t matter that Erwin knows what every inch of Levi’s skin feels like, knows what he _tastes_ like, knows how he sounds when Erwin is kissing him in _just_ the way he likes. His skin still fears Levi and his heart still craves him. 

It is worse when Levi bites him here. He feels it through his whole body, feels his nerves suddenly flare into fire, feels his back arch against the sofa and the lump in his throat swell as if to suffocate him. His hands curl into the cushions. He squeezes his eyes shut, a whine locked behind his lips. 

For one moment, it is so much worse. 

And then something breaks. Something washes over him, warm and smooth and totally enveloping and he _melts_ into the cushions, feels every clenched muscle relax at the way Levi is nestled against him, lips pressed to softest skin, to a place only Levi ever touches and it’s better, better than he could have hoped or imagined and he feels like he’s flying, like every cell of his body is breaking apart and drifting away. He realizes, very dimly, that Levi is holding his hand. 

He doesn’t just lose time. He loses himself. He loses all concept of existence beyond the solid weight nestled between his knees. Every time a thought threatens to form, to intrude upon the sheer, empty _bliss_ , Erwin feels it slip away before it can manifest. 

There is nothing but Levi. But the knowledge that he draws life from Erwin, that Erwin can be this for him. 

Somehow, he knows it is a very long time before he stirs at all. When he comes back to himself, something is missing. Levi is draped across his chest, nose nestled under Erwin’s ear and hands in his hair. He whispers in Erwin’s ear gently, quietly, and for a long moment, Erwin can’t speak. He manages a little groan instead. Levi kisses the pulse in his neck and gives him a few minutes more. 

“Where’d she go?” he says when he can make his lips move. That is what’s missing. The warmth against the back of his neck. Long, filed nails in his hair. They had been there, and now they’re gone. 

“Home,” Levi chuckles. “She said to tell you thank you. She left your money on the end table.” 

“My--” Erwin laughs. And then he stalls, a look of sheer horror on his face. “ _She didn’t-- I’m not--”_

Levi practically cackles at him. “Now you are.”

Erwin lets his head thump back against the sofa. Of all the _ridiculous_ things--

“How do you feel?” 

Erwin considers. “Like I’ve been asleep for a long time,” he admits. Then he adds, “Good.” 

Levi hums. Erwin lets his leg fall against Levi’s side and hisses sharply. The bruise is deep and consuming. Levi only says mildly, “Careful.”

“It’s alright,” Erwin answers, because he’d sensed hesitation in Levi’s voice. He stretches his leg out carefully. His head still feels thick and fuzzy. He is comfortable, but he almost feels a little delirious. It doesn’t make sense. He feels like he’s been _drugged._

“Is it magic?” he whispers. 

Levi lifts his head and looks at Erwin, brows furrowed. Then his face goes smooth and he shakes his head. “No.”

“Then why--”

Levi’s lips curl in amusement. “Human body is a crazy fucking miracle.” Erwin just wrinkles his nose at him, so Levi goes on. “Have you ever hurt yourself so badly it just… stopped hurting?” Erwin shrugs. He knows what Levi is talking about even if it’s never happened to him exactly like that. “Used to happen a lot when I was alive,” Levi tells him. “Never knew what it was until I smelled it.” 

“Hmm.” Erwin can’t be bothered to open his eyes anymore. Levi will keep talking; that is all he cares about. 

“See, when people are scared, you can smell it on them. Or happy. Or. It’s all in the blood, see? And when someone is hurt, you can smell that too. It’s like a fucking drug,” he admits, voice going husky. “You can _taste_ it. It’s why.” He goes quiet, all at once. 

“Why what?” Erwin finally asks. 

Levi hesitates, then he says, “It’s why the worst of _us_ like to… to hurt people before they kill them. If you. If you do it just right, the blood’s so full of… it’s a high. A _potent_ high. Whatever it is, we don’t feel it after we die. We can only take it from you.” 

“I don’t understand,” Erwin admits easily. 

Levi sits up and smoothes his hands over Erwin’s chest. Erwin’s shirt is unbuttoned though he doesn’t remember it happening.

“It’s not magic,” Levi tells him. “It’s just chemical.” 

Erwin cracks one eye. Levi’s lips curl wickedly all of a sudden. “Bet I could do the same thing with a wooden paddle and a little _time.”_ When Erwin just furrows his brows at Levi, Levi reaches out and tweaks his nipple so Erwin tenses briefly at the pinch. “Maybe some clothes pins.” 

Erwin can’t be bothered to be as scandalized as he thinks he should be. He closes his eyes again and mutters, “Scoundrel.” 

Levi snorts and says _very_ pointedly, “ _Whore.”_

*

Erwin feels fine within a few days and within a week he finds himself _fantasizing_ about the way Levi had pulled every thought from his head and left behind nothing but empty euphoria. Levi seems to trust himself again-- there are no more decanters of blood delivered every evening. Instead, he disappears into the cellar and returns to Erwin an hour or so later with a slightly pink flush in his pale cheeks and feeling, perhaps, just a little warmer than usual. 

It’s almost two full months before he’ll take from Erwin again. It becomes a regularity after that, something Erwin craves and looks forward to despite the strange, embarrassed shame that swells in his chest when he thinks about it. He feels as if he shouldn’t want it, as if letting himself be _sustenance_ is somehow beneath him, threatens to dehumanize him. 

Except Levi waits on him hand and foot after. He dotes on him. He kisses Erwin with such unbridled adoration Erwin wonders how he could possibly question what it means that he needs this, that they share it. He understands intimately now why the house teams with visitors every night, why sometimes they have to turn people away who have come too often, who would ruin their bodies for just a few more minutes with one of the tenants. They’re addicted. 

Erwin is too. 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [Tumblr!](https://ellabesmirched.tumblr.com/)


End file.
